John M. Anderson teaches creative writing and the Emily Dickinson Seminar at Boston College and divides his time between Boston and Cripple Creek, Colorado. John has new poems in Crazyhorse, Beloit Poetry Journal, Tuesday: An Art Project, and The Antioch Review, as well as a chapbook Dictionary Quilt (Pudding House, 2007). He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2007 and 2008, also for the Best New Poets anthology and for the Best of the Web; this year, his manuscript Blackwater Driveby was a finalist for the May Swenson Prize.
Following is a sample of his poetry:
The God of Negative Space Does Housework
all day in the empty Painted Desert Motel. Opens its countless windows for the circulation and stands ironing for hours his bachelor sheets tumbled soft from the dryer. Hours folding
fiesta napkins to dab lips long absent, whistling
a Country-Western tune he doesn’t like and can’t remember, one he doesn’t hear himself whistling, that he picked up from the untuned kitchen radio drying a flash flood
of the place's bone china. Housework all day, sweeping the long hall, finding the dust bunnies under beds that stand still as monuments now, draped in bruised-ribbed limestone. Beds that bucked and kicked like unbroken
mares in their own time. Vacuuming, not thinking, pulling shades against fading carpets. Sinking with the hot brick of the sun he keeps to warm his own bed. The God lies down in the canyon, exhausted. And doesn’t sleep. And dreams
Dorothy Derifield's work has received an editor's award from Plainsongs, and has appeared in the Radcliffe Quarterly and Harvard Magazine,among others. She is the director of the long-running literary series Chapter and Verse in Jamaica Plain and is a member of the Jamaica Pond Poets. She is the author of the chapbook, The River and the Lakes.
She lives in Roslindale and teaches poetry groups at Sherrill House, a nursing home in Jamaica Plain.
Following is a sample of her poetry:
FRACTAL MATH, A QUIZ
If a train leaves Grand Central heading west at 6 am
and a train leaves Union Statiion heading east,
which train will you be on? Show all
equations.
If your window is 30 inches wide, 50 inches
long, and your yellow curtains are too short,
what do you see from the window? The mailman
passing or the back where the land slides
away from you? Subtract trees from sky.
Add rain.
If you weigh 150 lbs. but every pound you ever lost
is added to your weight, will the moon pull you
roughly over the rocks, leave you bleeding
among her other lovers?
Carolyn Gregory has published poems and classical music reviews in American Poetry Review, Seattle Review, Pemmican, Ibbetson Street, Bellowing Ark, Main Street Rag, Poesy, Art Times, The Aurorean and Stylus. Recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Foundation award, she has published two chapbooks.
Her first full-length book, Open Letters, was published in 2009 by Windmill Editions. She has conducted workshops and given readings in Boston, New York, and Michigan. She is an active member of Jamaica Pond Poets and the New England Poetry Club.
Following is a sample of her poetry:
Taking Measure
Last night late, we drove past the river, shimmering silver under moonlight, a long stretch beside a dark road. You turned on the CD player, Visions of Johanna drawing out its long melodic line about beauty and belief. I told you I can't cry. You changed the music to the blues.
Earlier, we sat watching the play, drawn in by lunatics held in a cage. One spoke to noone and another banged against restraints.
On stage, good and evil warred between two men, one bent on sensual glut, the other pure but unable to unlock the kingdom. One spoke for human rights, the other praised the body, denouncing progress.
Dominance-submission, sense and nonsense. This is the war that pitches revolutions inside the soul. Fire hoses blast water on what remains.
One man's stabbed at another's expense. A raging woman changed history at the turn of her knife.
Afterward, we ride together through the dark, taking measure of our own demons. My sadist slashed your poet. Your accountant buried me under mountains of nickels.
The slide guitar draws out its slippery chords
as a black man wails about losing his job,
his home, his dog
and on through the traffic lights.
Holly Guran is the author of the chapbook River Tracks which won honorable mention and was published by Poets Corner Press fall 2007. Growing up near the banks of the Hudson River led her to explore time and love in the way water invites.
Holly received an International Merit Award from the Atlanta Review, placed second in the journal Explorations poetry competition and was a featured poet in The Aurorean and Bellowing Ark. Her poems have appeared in a variety of small press journals including 96, Inc., Hummingbird, Labyris, Poetry East and Connecticut River Review and in The Breath of Parted Lips, a Cavan Kerry Press anthology.
Holly's connections to Jamaica Plain include coordinating a reading series, Working Poets, which featured poets and musicians. She is retired from a long career at Roxbury Community College in Boston where she worked as counselor, teacher, administrator and grant writer.
Detailed etchings of people and nature, these poems luminously reflect the waters, urging us to look into the depths.Judy Katz-Levine, author of Ocarina
. . .a book of survival and growth as, on new rivers and compiling her 'catalogue of marsh and season', Guran delineates a past, a present and a future with care and love. Susan Donnelly, author of Transit
Audrey Henderson is originally from Edinburgh, Scotland. She graduated from the University of Edinburgh and has written frequently for BBC radio. She was a finalist in the 2008 IndianaReview 1/2 K Award and won second place in the 2008 River Styx International Poetry Contest.
In addition she won recognition as a Special Merit Poet in the 2009 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award Contest and was a finalist for the 2009 Philbrick Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in The Sow’sEar Review, the Roanoke Review, Timber Creek Review, Verandah and Taproot Literary Review among others and she has published a short story in the collection Tales to Tell. Her work will appear in the Comstock Review this fall.
She lives near Boston's Emerald Necklace, where she is a long-time volunteer at the Arnold Arboretum, guiding groups of third to sixth graders in the Field Study program. Her full-length poetry manuscript Airstream was completed this spring.
Following is a sample of her poetry:
Green Valentine
Over-wintered apples sagged, oozing liquor.
Lime green parakeets, two escapees
from the tropics pecked at them, grew silly.
On Madison that day two green parrots,
emerald in fact, were locked behind the grille
of an antique shop-- some old emperor’s good luck.
Alice Kociemba grew up in Jamaica Plain and returns here to write and enjoy the city. She lives and works as a psychotherapist in Falmouth, Ma. Alice is also a member of the Barnstable Unitarian Church, a poetry group where members read published poetry, as well as critique their own work. She is the director of Calliope – Poetry Readings at West Falmouth Library, a monthly poetry series.
When asked: “How did you get interested in poetry?” Alice credits Emily Dickinson with saving her sanity after she suffered a severe head injury in 1986 and couldn’t read, drive or work for six months. Shortly thereafter, Alice wrote her first poem seizure about her experience. If folk wisdom dictates: write what you know, Alice’s poems reflect her deep appreciation of people.
A frequent featured poet in local venues, she has been credited as: “the best storyteller I’ve ever heard!” She is working on her first volume of poetry, Seizure, and Other Disorders. Her poems have appeared in various journals, such as Plainsongs, Slant, Roanoke Review and one has won an International Merit Award from the Atlanta Review.
Following is a sample of her poetry:
seizure
sunlight flashes
random patterns through
barren limbs of tree.
fractured thoughts,
strange sensations,
eyes that do not see.
countless bruises,
senseless stupor,
time that's lost to me.
mere intuition
or premonition;
seizure's prophesy.
Jennifer Markell has lived in Jamaica Plain for over twenty years. She wrote her first short story “Billy and the Talking Sun” at age 6. The story received great acclaim from her mother and the next door neighbors.
Years later Markell received an M.A. in fiction from the Creative Writing Program at Boston University. Somewhere along the way she veered off into poetry and has not returned since. Markell’s work has been on display at Boston City Hall and is anthologized in “Poetry From Sojourner, a Feminist Anthology.” She was a featured poet in The Aurorean (spring 2008) and has been published in a variety of literary magazines. A chapbook of Markell’s poetry, “Leaving the Green Elm Market,” was published in 2006 by Sheltering Pines Press. In her work as a therapist and writer, she is passionate about the power of words to touch and transform lives. Markell is frequently found at work in her urban backyard, coaxing plants, vines, and a stubborn peach tree to bloom.
Brian McMichael grew up in a working-class family in Anaheim, California. Yes, like many of his high school classmates, he also worked at Disneyland. He earned his Bachelor's in Psychology at Chapman University while serving 10 years in the Marine Corps as a Dog Handler, stationed in California and on Okinawa, Japan. After getting out of the military, he worked as a Community Educator for Planned Parenthood. He earned a commission as an Armor Officer serving in the National Guard and Army Reserve.
While working as an Alternative Education Teacher for foster care children, he finally decided to address his, "Problem that would not go away," and embarked on a journey that culminated in graduating from medical school with distinction in humanities at the University of California, Irvine. After initially training in Emergency Medicine at Detroit Receiving Hospital, he is now completing a residency in Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation Medicine at Tufts Medical Center.
Brian has been writing poems for nearly two decades, and has been published in several literary annuals. He enjoys among other things choral singing, Jungian psychology and comparative religion. Under the category, "What goes around comes around," Brian's adult son, by a previous marriage, Daniel has just entered Army Basic Training, making Brian a little crazy. Brian lives in West Roxbury, with his composer-pianist wife, Linda, and that intrepid lap-warmer, Piccolo the cat.
Following is a sample of his poetry:
Lost and Found
Before you were married and divorced you lived together for a time in an Craftsman, built in the 19-teens in the backyard, the dirt had chunks of ceramic and metal bits of broken glass that time would expose and rain would polish clean these were dangerous for the dog you told yourself
After a storm you’d patrol the backyard for these antique hazards you’d walk a systematic pattern searching the ground for crusty jaggednesses worrisome iridescent glints
You took to noticing the patterns that these pieces laid in reconstructing them in your mind into their original wholenesses you’d imagine the people who used them and then discarded or lost these bits and pieces that you were mapping out over time
The ghost that haunted the breakfast nook shuffling about most mornings before daybreak and repeatedly opening that same window looking out onto the backyard was probably hunting for one of these keepsakes, which you could never completely recover
Later as things were coming apart you thought of intentionally creating your own artifact breaking something and leaving it out in the yard scattering all but a few, completing pieces for those to come after
who might someday work this site with shovels and sifters brushing away the earth to free the incubating relics perhaps the only surviving traces of you
You could see her crouching down intently patiently assembling that mosaic piecing together a life in her imagination her face would look down on these remains, she would pause and smile to herself as she understands what she has found
Sandra Storey’s poems were named finalists in two recent national poetry contests, including one sponsored by Poetry Daily. Her poems have been published in various literary magazines, including the New York Quarterly and New Millennium Writings.
Storey was a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand and lived in Southeast Asia from 1968 to 1972. The editor and publisher of two neighborhood newspapers and a former English teacher, she is the co-author of a non-fiction book about ordinary people who influence public policy published in 1992. She wrote poetry from 1980 to 1988 and resumed in 2004, joining JPP in 2005. She has been a featured reader at many Boston-area venues.
Her work has been called “both witty and tender.” One reader said her poems “invite readers in and ask us to get involved. They seem simple at first, but, once in, we discover they are complicated.”
Following is a sample of her poetry: Where the view is unobstructed
the sun setting looks just like
the sun rising
split in two on the curved horizon
balanced on the edge
of the same half-lit, hopeful worlds
the yin and yang once were tears
the dots in each, the pairs of eyes that cried them
now light and dark are twirling cheek to cheek
the sun setting is the sun rising
far away, just out of sight
Gary Whited is a poet, philosopher and psychotherapist. He grew up on the plains of eastern Montana, and a strong sense of place pervades his poems, whether that place is the prairie, the city or the inner spaces we inhabit.
His poems have appeared in Salamander,The Aurorean, Bellowing Ark, Red Owl Magazine, and in Diamond Dust, an on-line publication. He received an International Merit Award in 2003 for a poem published in Atlanta Review, and in Spring, 2007, he won an Editor’s Prize in Plainsongs. He is a contributing author to the first anthology of the Jamaica Pond Poets titled This Great Gift, collected poems of grief and healing, and to a collection of essays in honor of his philosophy teacher, Henry Bugbee, titled Wilderness and the Heart, Henry Bugbee’s Philosophy of Place, Presence, and Memory. Gary is currently working on a poetry manuscript titled Having Listened, and on a prose manuscript titled Parmenides, Poetry and Psychotherapy.
Hehas participated in many poetry readings and open mikes in the Boston area. He was a featured reader at Calliope, a reading venue in Falmouth on the Cape in 2009, at A Tapestry of Voices, in Boston,in 2006, Chapter and Verse in Jamaica Plain, in 2005, and again in 2008, and was the opening reader for the Brookline Booksmith Poetry Series in 2004. He was the featured reader at an annual fundraising night of poetry and music, 1998 to 2004, for the Friends of the International School of St. Petersburg, Russia. He is a member of the Jamaica Pond Poets.
Following is a sample of his poetry:
Ever
As if the old granary smell
would ever vanish,
or the cedar fenceposts
never rot off.
As if the harnesses hanging in the hayloft
would ever shed all those spider webs
maybe someday even, find the sweaty back
and haunch of another horse.
As if the dealer at the Ranger Bar would ever smile,
the bartender show above her knees,
or my father drive the old truck home
in time for evening's barn chores.
As if any of us would stay there waiting
beside the one gray and open door.
Home
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