Anthologies
Liberty's Vigil,
The Occupy Anthology
99 Poets among the 99%

Knocking on the Silence
(Finger Lakes Anthology)

The Dire Elegies
(Endangered Species Anthology)

Listening to Water
(Susquehanna Watershed Anthology)

doing time to cleanse my mind
(Auburn Prison Anthology)

I WAS INDIAN
(before being Indian was cool)
AN ANTHOLOGY OF
NATIVE LITERATURE
VOLUME I


 Knocking on the Silence
An Anthology of Poetry
Inspired by
The Finger Lakes



Edited by
Donna M. Marbach  
and
Patricia Roth Schwartz
Cover art by Dorothy Harrison
*****************

Knocking on the Silence is a 120 page
hand-sewn book with spine - $19.95

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***************************************
 The Dire Elegies
59 Poets on Endangered Species of North America
(Ordering Information Below)

Illustartion by David M. Carroll


Karla Linn Merrifield, chief editor, and co-editor Roger M. Weir have assembled a first anthology of its type in the world to inspire readers to take action on behalf of the continent's endangered plants and animals.  

"Poets here have left their ivory towers to encourage their neighbors to walk in the woods, observe the world, learn - and act,” said Merrifield, who teaches writing in the New York state university system.

Dr. Edward O. Wilson, world-renowned Harvard entomologist and two-time Pulitzer-Prize winning author, points out in the epigraph to this unique collection of poetry, “…the better an ecosystem is known, the less likely it will be destroyed.”  

This is the premise of “THE DIRE ELEGIES: 59 Poets on Endangered Species of North America” and why author Bill McKibben (“The End of Nature,” “Enough,” and “Wandering Home”) says in the book's foreword, “These magnificent poems work as a chant to summon more” of the love to save the endangered from extinction.  It's also why writer Susan Cerulean (“Tracking Desire: A Journey After Swallow-tailed Kites”) has called the book an “important manifesto: a must-read for our times.”  

 Included in the anthology are noted poets William Heyen, Maxine Kumin, W. S. Merwin, Enid Shomer, James E. Smelcer, Gary Snyder, Brian Swann and Lewis Turco among others.  The 59 poets are from all across the U.S. and Canada.  

The book's cover illustration depicting painted turtles in hibernation was donated by New Hampshire artist and naturalist David M. Carroll, recipient of The Burroughs Award for his Swampwalker's Journal: A Wetland's Year.

Science Meets Poetry

     A helpful feature of the anthology is the species notes that accompany the poems each time a new species is introduced.  

For example, when readers encounter Minnesota poet Shirley S. Stevens's poem “On Spotting a Pygmy Owl,” they also learn:  “The endangered cactus ferruginous pygmy owl, Glaucidium brasilianum cactorum, of the U.S. Southwest and Mexico, numbered only 12 birds when it was listed in the U.S. in 1997.  A USF&WS recovery team began its work to rescue the species in 1998, but its fate remains precarious.”   

     “This anthology is a major advance along a most important frontier: forging compassion for endangered species, and using our human self-awareness to reflect on whether we really wish to travel the road we're on.,” said Carl Safina, author of Song for the Blue Ocean and Voyage of the Turtle, and founder and president of the Blue Ocean Institute.


The Dire Elegies
is a 120 page hand-sewn book with spine - $19.95

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Send orders to:                      

FootHills Publishing
PO Box 68
Kanona, NY 14856
*********************************
 Listening to Water
The Susquehanna Watershed Anthology

Edited by Jennifer Hill-Kaucher and Dan Waber
Cover Art by Christine Goldbeck

Introduction

We were sharing poems our favorite way, among friends, over beverages, within the slow swirl of an autumn breeze, at the dining room table, when Michael asked us if we'd be interested in editing an anthology for him and FootHills Publishing. Sure, we said, what sort of anthology? Michael went on to tell us how he thought it would be appropriate to put together an anthology of poems from the Susquehanna Watershed area, because that's what  FootHills' first book had been, almost 20 years ago. Who would dream of saying “no”?

In the process of putting together the collection you now hold in your hands we used several criteria. First, the poems selected had to strike us both as being excellent poems. Second, the excellent poems had to be emblematic of the anthology's area of focus, the Susquehanna Watershed. By “emblematic” we mean that they had to perform the dual function of making residents of the area say “yes, that's us all right” and allowing non-residents to say “oh, now I understand the region better.” Third, the excellent, emblematic poems had to blend organically with the other poems selected. We didn't want to assemble a collection that throbbed with flashpops of disconnected poems. We wanted to assemble a collection that flows, like the Susquehanna herself - an anthology that twists and winds its way, surely, into every aspect of the lives of the people of an entire region.

Here's to 20 years of FootHills Publishing, and here's to 20 more.


Dan Waber & Jennifer Hill-Kaucher
Editors
Listening to Water
is a 100 page hand-sewn book with spine - $16.00

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********************************
 

an anthology from
the Inmates' Poetry Workshop
of Auburn Correctional Facility
Auburn, New York    2001-2009


“Listen, America!  These poems are the best of what Robert Pinsky's Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry, describes as an attempt to balance our national Memory.  Open your eyes, mind, and hearts to the simple, frank, unsettling beauty.”
                 -Vincent F. A. Golphin, PhD, poet, author of Like A Dry Land: A Soul Journey Through the Middle East


"Hearing of my writing class at Albion, well-meaning friends would say, 'How great to be helping imprisoned women find their voices!'  Just as Pat Schwartz has, I've met instead inmates with pages of writing, much of it already astounding.  In this anthology, one poet asserts, 'No, I am not voiceless...'  Indeed! So give these men what they really want to find: not their voices-but your ear, or, in this case, your eye!"  
  -Karen Anderson, poet and prison volunteer


Monday Night Poetry is special because it's the only place in this petrified world where we can gather round the campfire of our souls and give life to our joy and pain.

-Michael Rhynes, co-facilitator of the Inmates'
Poetry Workshop at ACF and author of
Guerillas in the Mist, and Other Poems...


This unique collection gives voice to those individuals who have been shuttered away. Their voices in turn open a dialogue we all need to think about.

-Dale Davis
Executive Director, The New York Literary Center


Reading the poems in this anthology felt freeing. The fiery, raw, raven-eyed honesty of its incarcerated men's work made me feel less locked inside whatever bars of ignorance, anger, fear, and stereotypes I'm peering through. I am grateful to these poets for the brave dignity of their words-for being my teacher. A dark night of the soul journey, indeed, but one which guides the reader out into a shock of transcending light.

-Susan Deer Cloud, poet, editor
and author of The Last Ceremony


From the Forward by Janine Pommy Vega:

Reading Doing Time to Cleanse My Mind, I realized the poems were created
in the supportive environment of a writing workshop. After ten years and
thousands of manuscripts read for the PEN Prison Writing Awards (PEN stands
for Poets, Editors & Novelists, an international association of writers), I
have learned to recognize poems from whatever confined corner of this nation
someone or some group is actively working on his/her/their craft. The nuts
and bolts are hidden, but the images are nailed in place, and the
imagination leaps out in an arc that touches the reader.
Week after week the writers of this anthology gathered in some corner of
Auburn Prison, brought together by the arrival of a visitor, the poet
Patricia Roth Schwartz. The whole premise and requirement of weekly writing
sessions brought about the inspiration, formulation, creation, sharing, and
thereafter the editing of these poems. They are the works of writers
concerned with the big questions: Who am I? What am I doing here? What is
this society I am part of? What about my loved ones, how can I serve them?
. . . . .

Having read through the contents of this anthology several times these
past weeks, I have earmarked my personal favorites-both writers and
poems-which I will not share with you. Rather I urge you to pick your own.
Novelist Bernard Malamud, who once served as president of PEN American
Center, said, and I'm paraphrasing, that his belief in a fellowship of
writers had to do with fostering “literature as a civilizing force in an
unstable world; a literature that gives flesh and bones and perhaps a brain
to the politics that assail us; a literature that entices us to understand
and value life.” That pretty much describes the book you're holding in your
hands


From the Introduction by Patricia Roth Schwartz:

What's it like for a teacher to enter the school where she plans to
teach, not through ivy-covered arches into a sunlit book-lined classroom,
but by passing under a hulking stone entry worthy of a medieval fortress,
then submit to a metal detector, a search of her briefcase, having
previously had a mug shot and fingerprints taken? Then she walks, not
across a grassy campus, but over an asphalt-surfaced walled yard, escorted
by armed guards, past towering turrets manned by gunmen, into a building
sparsely stocked with only basic furniture, no supplies, and peeling paint.
Intimidating? Fearsome? Perhaps… Yet what's it like to find her students pouring into the meager
classroom brimming with eagerness and enthusiasm, clutching sheaves of poems
and stacks of manuscripts they've been working on for years, many
self-educated in subjects ranging from mythology to history to world
religions? Thus began my experience as a volunteer facilitator of an
inmates' poetry workshop inside Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum
security men's prison first built in 1821, with most of its original
forbidding architecture still intact.






Proceeds: The editors of this book are donating all their profits from book sales to the Raven's Wing Fund, which provides free copies to the poets' families and friends and to present and future members of the Inmates' Poetry Workshop at ACF, as well as helping to make possible future publishing projects.

doing time to cleanse my mind
is a 76 page hand-stitched paperbook with spine
$16.00

TO ORDER  ON-LINE                               

From the US or Canada       


From Other Countries           
     

To order through mail click here.
********************************
 

I WAS INDIAN

(before being Indian was cool)

AN ANTHOLOGY OF
NATIVE LITERATURE
VOLUME I

Edited by Susan Deer Cloud


TABLE OF CONTENTS

I Was Indian - Introduction    Susan Deer Cloud     9

Paul Hapenny
   Halfbreed Boy     15                                                                                                                                        
   Reverie on the Southeast Expressway     17                                        
   The Indian Joke      19
   Pain of Mystic      21

Monty Campbell
   Rez Photos     22
   Lamentation     23
   On Ancient Land     24
   Organic Turmoil      25
   Warm Winter     26

Paula Gunn Allen
   America the Beautiful V     27
   A Trick of Light     28

Sayra Pinto-Wilson
   The Story I Will Tell the Youngsters When I Am Old     29
   Hiking With My Uncle Carlos     31

Charles Bane, Jr.
   Widening     32

Lance Henson
   All the Names     33                                                                                
   From Jordan      34
   Crossing     35                                                                                
   A Sudden Dislocation & Passages     36  
   Here     37

Sarah Littlecrow-Russell
   Storm Poems     38
   Indian Child Support     39
   I Do Not Know Your Name     40
   Atlantic Bridge     41

Stephanie Elliot  
   Consider the Pinpoint of Entry     42

Chip Livingston
   Coon Was Here, 1985     44                                                                                 
   Crow Blue-Crow Black     46
   Apalachee Tuscaloosa     47       

Dave Brinks
   In Stone Stelae, in Nebulae     48
   The Ouroborous     49

John David Henson
   Watching TV     50
   Early Morning Storm     52
   Learning to Let Go     53

Cedar Firesong Robideau
   Firesong, Dark, Death     54

Barney Bush
   Arrows     55
   A June Wind Above Regina     57

Black Bear
  Indian Man     59
   Winter Stillness     60

Briget Truex    
   Song     61

nila northSun
   Pale in the Desert     62                                                                             
   Poetic Phrases     63     

Sandra Haley
   Marvin's Funeral     64  

Kim Shuck
   Objects May Be Closer Than They Appear     65     

Asani Charles
   Indin Souljer Boy     67

J.P. Dancing Bear
   A Brief Informal History     68

Diane Way
    NDN Blues     69

Rick Kearns
   Kill the Indian     72

Martin Esapada
   Colibrí     74
   All the People Who Are Now Red Trees     75  

Charles Johnson                                                                                     
   Piedras Negras     76

Ron Welburn
   String Theory     77
   Mohawk Memory (Schoharie County, N.Y.)     78                       
   Every Morning Is a Season     79

James Autio
   Nind Inaabandam/I Dream     80                                                          
   Lemon Poppyseed     81

Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán
   Hibernate     82

Eric Schwartz
   New World     83

Gary Wilkens
   Indian Recycler     84                                                                          
   82 MPH on the NY State Thruway     85       

Jennifer Lemming
   Quilting Circle     86    

Kim Becker
   Beloved Woman     87            

Linda Hogan
   Dimensions     88                                                                                     
   Affinity: Mustang     90    

Matthew C. Wolfe   
   On the Rez     92
   O Great Spirit     94   

Thomas Hubbard
   Lakota Woman     96
   This Morning's Blues     97

Vicenti Kurle Caljesuseso
   Sweet T     98

DeLyssa Begay/Black Sheep Woman
   Bear     99                                                                                

Joe Bruchac
   Wawanogit     101
   Ghost Song     102

Rane Arroyo    
   No Burying Echoes     104
   The Blue Lagoon (a Remake)     106

Latona Swan-Ena
   Counting Coup     107                                                     

Alice M. Azure
   Walking in the Rain     111

Tiffany Midge
   Imagining Yes     112
   A Song for Conjuring Shelter     113

Ray “Moose” Jackson
   I Want to Make Love to You     114

Susan Deer Cloud
   Horse     116
   Sugar Daddy     117
   Our Parallel Universe     118               

From the book:

I WAS INDIAN  INTRODUCTION - Susan Deer Cloud

Then all Indians
lived in country
my people in Catskills
where Indians
were “part Indian”
families extended
including boy cousins
too numerous to count
including wolf-eyed friends
also “part Indian”

All Indian kids
flung rocks   burrs   snakes
at non-Indian kids
dumb enough to wander
onto Indian territory
in my case School Street
no white girls dared wear
a snake necklace the way
an Indian girl dared to
every Indian child
got savaged by teachers
teaching Indians are savages

Little Indian rebels with a cause
got low grades if they spoke up
against so-called founding fathers
who stole Indian land   made
Mother Earth their whipping girl
all the budding warriors' mothers
warned them not to tell outsiders
their dreams   beautiful ways
lest they'd be caged as crazy

Long time ago
when all Indians
went berry picking
strawberries in June
blackberries in July
blueberries in August
beechnuts and apples in fall
boys   men      hunting   fishing
wild meat for every meal
joking   you are what you eat

All our wild boys
tongues tasting of fried trout
plump berries   hard cider
the way third cousins tasted
when we bartered kisses
in high mountain meadows
when kisses howled forth
shadows of panthers
passenger pigeons
oh   my lost wild heart

And continuing genocide
the ones who tried to shame us
called us dirty   dumb
our untamed tenderness suspect
when all our mothers led us
to the rivers of summer
when our small bodies
wept into the waters
under mountain laurel slopes
when we let our salt grief
wash out to the seas of deepness

Breathing in then   white pine
blue spruce   firefly nights
when Indians stood up for Indians
no one carried an identity card
no one had to whisper
they hated the U.S. Government
no professors informed us
we were Native Americans
when America didn't hunger to be US
believed eastern Injuns were all dead
When we survivors gathered
beneath a Tree of Peace
but no one called it that
we had swallowed the garbage of exile
for too many centuries
we simply sang   played   together
cradled babies together
that was our powwow
no bumperstickers for sale
no I was Indian before being
Indian was cool to slap
on all our rusting Indian cars'
proud rear ends
only our dreamcatcher faces
refusing to vanish


LAMENTATION - Monty Campbell

Angel of light,
angel of simple alabaster,
gun breath or whiskey,
connect me to dirt,
let me find a brother
in this ancient,
sacred soil,
let the turtles wake
wash me upon an
unshrapneled shore,
take my simple cloth
and sew it to the
sky world
where an old woman's hands
would heal me to sleep,
make the stripes of an
unwanted father bleed on the
hands of a father forgotten,
let him awake,
let them all awake,
pound the drum until the
fire is blazing, until
every spirit stands
or dances.


AFFINITY: MUSTANG - Linda Hogan

Tonight after the sounds of day
have given way
she stands beneath the moon,
a gray rock shining.
She matches the land,
belonging.

She has a dark calm face,
her hooves like black stone
belong to the earth
the way it used to be,
long grasses
as grass followed rain
or wind laid down the plains of fall
or in winter now when
her fur changes and becomes snow
or her belly hair turns
the color of red water willows
at the creek,
her legs black as trees.

These horses
almost a shadow,
broken.

When we walk together
in the tall grasses, I feel her
as if I am walking with mystery,
with beauty and fierce powers,
as if for a while we are the same animal
and remember each other from before.

Or sometimes I sit on earth
and watch the wind blow her mane and tail
and the waves of dry grasses
all one way
and it calls to mind
how I've come such a long way
through time
to find her.

Some days I sing to her
remembering the Kiowa man
who sang to cover the screams
of their ponies killed by the Americans
the songs I know in my sleep.

Some nights, hearing her outside,
I think she is to the earth
what I am to her,
belonging.

Sometimes it seems as if we knew each other
from a time before our journeys here
In secret, I sing to her, the old songs
the ones I speak in my sleep.

But last night it was her infant that died
after the kinship and movement
of so many months
Tonight I sit on the straw
and watch as the milk streams from her nipples
to the ground.  I clean her face.
I've come such a long way through time
to find her and
it is the first time
I have ever seen a horse cry.

Sing then, the wind says,
Sing.


    I WAS INDIAN is a 128 page hand-stitched paper book with spine.   $16.00

TO ORDER  ON-LINE                               

From the US        

From Canada   

From Other Countries           
     


To order through mail click here.