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A collection of poetic "orphans." Poems that had fallen by the wayside because they didn't seem to be anything that anyone would want to have around (hence the "orphan"). The poetry in this collection hopscotches around encompassing the years 1993 to 2016. It represents the forgotten poems from four previous collections: Fire and Rain (Volumes 1 & 2), E/OR and the expurgated version, Living Among the Mangled. Remarkably, many of the poems are still relevant to the concerns that many of us have today. . . perhaps proving that RD is a savvy visionary or (more likely) that the story doesn't change, only the characters do.
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ISBN 9780999778432
Poetry Collection
Speak the Language of the Land is the first of what will be an annual showcase of talented poets, presented by the Lummox Press in conjunction with The LUMMOX Poetry Anthology and the Angela Consolo Mankiewicz Poetry Prize (courtesy of the estate of Angela C. Mankiewicz and her husband, Richard Mankiewicz). The winners of this year's contest are: Jeffrey Alfier (Torrance, CA), 1st place; Mike Mahoney (Wallingford, PA), 2nd place; and Vachine (Los Angeles, CA), 3rd place. New to the contest are these Honorable Mentions: Donna Snyder (El Paso, TX); William Taylor, Jr. (San Francisco, CA); James Deahl (Canada); and April Bulmer (Canada). -
ISBN 9780999778401 52 pgs. Perfect Bound
By Gil Hagen Hill
The past haunts these highly allusive poems, rich with thoughtful, precise images that convey “numinous ambiguities,” as in the title poem. A Circle of Bones is a welcome addition to 21st-century American poetry. — Clifton Snider
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ISBN 9780998458083 CHAPBOOK - 58 pages
By Jeannine M. Pitas
These poems are my grateful response to those who dream. To my own ancestors and family members, without whom I would not be alive to write these words. To the many women who, despite terrible circumstances, have refused to be silenced. To all those people who acknowledge the truth that political borders are nothing but imaginary lines drawn on a map. To those who feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and comfort the afflicted. Thank you so much. Now, more than ever, this world is needful of your compassion and hope. — Jeannine Pitas
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ISBN 978-0-998458076 108 pages, Trade Paperback
By Alex Johnston
For me, writing poetry is like solving, and then creating a puzzle. I see or experience things I know I want to write about, we all do. Figuring out a way to put those experiences on paper, so as to make them readable, is how one solves the puzzle. Avoiding straightforwardness and balancing on a knife edge, between enigmatic and readability, is how one creates the puzzle. I spent nearly three years revisiting, rewriting and re-getting pissed off at, The October Horse. I reference this poem so much because it is also almost entirely autobiographical (as is most of the book). I trudged through problems with addictions, like so many other 20 somethings, and I was maybe one or two bad decisions away from writing this book in prison (lucky me). The poem is so important to me because even when I was in the total animal soup of time (Ginsberg again!), I knew I wanted to write about that chapter of my life. — Alex Johnston
Read a sampling of poems from this book here. Read an interview with Alex Johnston here. -
ISBN 978-0-9984580-5-2 6 X 9; 120 pages; Trade Paper
By Bill Gainer
Bill Gainer’s world is not a safe place, not for the old men, not for him. It’s a place of mysterious things, happenings, people, and times. It’s a place where the mysteries of old men are told, not with guilt, but as they happened. The Mysterious Book of Old Man Poems tells of a time mostly past, not forgotten, but hidden away in the hearts of old men, its magic intact.
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By Mary McGinnis
LUMMOX PRESS IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THE WINNER OF THE 2017 LUMMOX POETRY CONTEST...Mary McGinnis of Santa Fe, New Mexico!! Her winning poem was "No Father".
As part of her prize, Mary received 30 copies of this chapbook. She also is featured in the 6th edition of the Lummox Poetry Anthology and receives a small cash prize. -
ISBN 978-0-9984580-3-8 FORMAT: 5.5 X 8.5 inches; Perfect Bound 36 pgs
By Linda Lerner and Donna Joy Kerness
Between 1692—93 twenty people were accused of being witches and executed in Salem Massachusetts. Nineteen were hanged on Gallows Hill, and one elderly man was pressed to death by heavy stones after he wouldn’t enter a plea. Several others died in jail.
My purpose in this collection is not to retell what happened, which is widely known, or to give an account of Arthur Miller’s powerful, play, The Crucible. Instead, I’ve chosen to use his technique and blend characters together with people we know living among us.
What is going on now in this country makes it especially poignant for me, but to restrict it to that, is also too limiting. I see the situation as something ongoing, barely noticeable, until an accumulation of incidents makes it impossible to ignore, its darkness sweeps down on us, and we have no choice but to rise up and confront it.
400 years is next door, across the street, the place where you live and work; it is the distance between one neighbor and another. The village was called Salem then. Its villagers walk among us; they act like us. We do not recognize them. We prefer not to. — from Linda Lerner's introduction
Watch Linda read from this book here. -
ISBN 9780998458007 30 Pages
By Ron Lucas
"I have been writing all my life. As a child in rural KY, I wrote long, highly derivative, doubtlessly horrible novels and intuitively mailed them to the only address I knew: my hillbilly transplant grandparents in Indiana. As an adult, I've been publishing poetry in the small presses for decades. I also suffer from anxiety and depression... when the "Great Recession" hit, I lost my car, my job, my place, and... my mind. I became so deeply depressed I even stopped writing for the first time ever. Several years later, when I started again, I found myself writing about my childhood; a topic I'd virtually never covered. And I found it very cathartic. This book grew, rather organically, out of that. I chose the title and cover because that old architectural oddity of a market is such a powerfully evocative symbol of that time and place for me." — Ron Lucas -
By Rob Plath and Janne Karlsson
Text by Rob Plath and illustrations by Swedish artist, Janne Karlsson, seems like the work of two cadavers who refused to be dead and so they kicked their way out of their morgue drawers, beat the shit out of the grim reaper, danced on his bones, and then proceeded to scrawl poems and drawings on the cold, silent walls before escaping into the night. Don’t miss this chilling and humorous book filled with the mad graffiti of these two mortal bastards.
For samples go here. Read a review here or this other review -
ISBN 9781929878635
By Georgia Santa Maria
CONGRATULATIONS TO GEORGIA SANTA MARIA - RECIPIENT of the 3rd LUMMOX POETRY PRIZE...This book is part of the prize.
I was introduced to dowsing by a neighbor in the 1970’s in Miami, New Mexico. It is the ancient art of finding water underground by using two sticks, either green twigs or pieces of wire. In the book, I introduce him in the poem “Dowser”. I watched him use both green elm and unbent coat-hangars. He held them out straight in front of him, and when he was over water, the sticks crossed and bent downward. A person with this skill is called a “water-witch”. My friend had “dowsed” most of the wells in our community over his seventy odd years of living there. He taught me to do it as well, and I can’t explain it, but the sticks turned in my hands spontaneously over the same places they did for him, and I could feel the tug. — Georgia Santa Maria
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ISBN 9781929878550
By Judith R. Robinson
ABOUT THIS BOOKWhile "Carousel," contains new material, it is also the culmination of many years of work and publication. I am grateful to my publisher, Lummox Press, and its editor, RD Armstrong, for an opportunity to share this writing with an expanded audience. For me, reading and writing are the two sides of world-exploration. Poems and stories, at their best, are at once personal and universal, and as necessary to a fully realized life as food and drink---and more, a human pleasure. My hope is that this book will bring some measure of that to readers. — Judith R. Robinson "Judith Robinson is a poet of image and motion. She composes poems like songs with clarity and vision, trimmed with memory. She’ll take you along on the road she’s traveling, and it’s the least dangerous place you’ll ever be—filled with flowers and colors—sometimes sadness—but even that will endear – as she holds her mirror up to the world." — Grace Cavalieri, “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress” Read some selections from Carousel.
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ISBN 9781929878789 40 pages
By RD Armstrong
Thomas K. Armstrong, my father, died in early January 2015, in his sleep of a heart attack. He had suffered, over the past six years, from Vascular Dementia (the lesser-known half of senility, Alzheimer's being the more widely known form). A month before, in Dec. of 2014, I had been to see him. This chapbook contains poems and blogs about that visit and his subsequent death. People deal with the death of a parent in many ways: denial, anger, guilt, bargaining, transference...it goes on and on. Grief has no timetable either so it may take years for that loss to resolve itself (or it may never happen). In my case, I turned to a projection of my dad as a black rabbit. Some might call this transference or an animal fetish; I dunno. -
By Ann Curran
The poems in Ann Curran’s Knitting the Andy Warhol Bridge flash with a quiet brilliance. An adroit wordsmith, Curran turns clever on its head; her poems can become deadly at the least provocation, not to mention funny, dark, illuminating, and often, heartbreakingly sad. Her poems celebrate life in all its sullied glory. No subject escapes her critical gaze: weddings, sports stadiums, parolees sharing a moment, adoption, racism, war, rumors, love, death. Even the penis is fair game for her wit. These poems sparkle with specifics; they dig deep, nudge the reader toward tolerance. “The New Pastor” “urges the faithful/ to open their hearts to different people: the food co-op kid with rings in his nose,/ lips and eyebrows, the Latino next door,/ college students with raucous beer parties,/ even the half-black U.S. president./ Put down the iPod, the Wi-Fi-fed notebook. / See the live people. …Deal with the real.” This timely, remarkable collection deals with the real in a profound and brand new way. It is a considerable achievement and a terrific read. — Alexis Rhone Fancher, poetry editor of Cultural Weekly, author of State of Grace: The Joshua Elegies, and How I Lost My Virginity to Michael Cohen and other Heart Stab Poems
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ISBN 978-1-929878-53-6 162 pages, 6 X 9 inches, Trade Paper
By Alan Catlin
“Let’s ride the angels goodbye.” —Jack Micheline
Just before the bar war to end all bar wars, the girl with an unbreakable heart leaned over the bar, ripped the buttons off her shirt and said, “I don’t need no ink or silicone to prove I’m a 100% Grade A American Babe.” The way she said it seemed more like a statement of fact than an offer or a dare: regardless, no one was inclined to disagree. So the barman was thinking, momentarily distracted before the overhead rail lights were pulled down, long neck Buds hit the back bar bottles and wall to wall chaos ensued: a flash flood of violence taking out everything in its way. If this were an indie movie all these bodies in motion would be slowed to half speed, made into a grotesque ballet, a techno Rave with flickering lights momentarily revealing distorted faces, flexing muscles, a strange, almost beautiful, mise en scene only a 911 call could interrupt, could make complete, with police whistles, drawn truncheons, and Taser light shows; but it wasn’t a movie, only something like real life. Hours after, the blood dries on the hardwood floors, the click of the muted jukebox cycling most played songs, priming the invisible crowds, and an almost suffocating rush of forced wet air as the lifeless night turns into day. The last man standing behind the bar sips his bottomless pint, and cut glass shots, through a short straw, dulled pains slowly ebbing into an alcoholic daze. — Alan Catlin -
ISBN 9781929878611 36 pages
By Joris Soeding
In Between the Places Where Night Falls unveils the first years of a relationship. These free verse poems journey through rural Michigan and the Pacific Northwest, eventually leading to the urban backdrops of Chicago, Dubuque, London, Sarasota, and Vancouver. Beauty and grit revolve around two people through a unique voice. — Joris Soeding
Something Like Paris
the doe teeters from Rosehill Cemetery crossing Ravenswood Avenue seeming lost on Mother’s Day, 8:15 a.m. even fog and rain in the corner this scene from a movie except for the city as backdrop you’re asleep in 14E perhaps we’re above Roswell the sky a bit too blue babies silent since take-off the gentleman in 8F with a mustache, sunglasses atop his head, and blue shirt seems distracted, sore, or both the attendant hilarious flight 1156 to Las Vegas shifts for the first time and you awaken, fearful -
ISBN 978-1-929878-60-4 150 pages, 6 X 9 inches, Trade Paper
By James Deahl
Here is the definitive book of prose-poems, destined to be a classic of the genre on every reference shelf. A new adventure in the evolving presentation of Canadian poetry, a welcome innovation of compact vision, allowing many threads of existence to wind together on a brief, powerful page. The lyricism, the heart-tug of common human experience, is strongly present, just as the emotional highs we have come to expect of great poetry. James Deahl’s prose-poem form allows the freedom of disparate experiences to be gathered with meaningful connection into the paragraphs poetically linked. The form is not limited to a single insight, but has the sweeping vibrancy to allow geography, time, season, and circumstance to flow together, like a stony riverbed, ever changing, ever the same, as we imprint personal events onto the backdrop. A story unfolds and surprises inside each prose-poem here, enhanced by natural setting, a history straddling the tides of our memories and experiences in cities and towns that have watchfully witnessed our arrivals and departures. Unbroken Lines heralds a welcome new experience in poetic expression, leaves you hungry for more. The introductory poem, “Damp Stones,” encapsulates the hammer power of compact lines, shadowing myth, beauty, fear, desire, old yearnings caught in knots of the woods in all our subconscious minds. Deahl’s poem “The Meadow” expresses these revelations searingly: “only the realm of indestructible forms remains, a realm outside the tarnished world of matter, like a meadow of endless spring living in the imagination of a child.”
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WINNER OF THE SECOND LUMMOX POETRY PRIZE
ISBN 9781929878666 46 pages, 6 X 9 paperbackBy H. Marie Aragon
H. Marie Aragon of Santa Fe, New Mexico has won the 2015 Lummox Poetry Prize with her poem The Dark and Light Side of the Moon. The prize consists of a cash award of $250 and forty copies of a chapbook created by Lummox Press for the author. When Desert Willows Speak is the chapbook. It's 46 pages long and can be ordered from Lummox Press (see the ordering information below). Read a sample from the chapbook here. We hope you will enjoy it. -
ISBN 9781929878703 Perfect Bound 5.5 X 8.5
By Tim Peeler
The ghost town of Henry River is located in the southeast corner of Burke County in the Foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in western North Carolina. Built at the turn of the 20th Century, the village, as it is often called now, has been mostly deserted since the 1970’s when, soon after a change in ownership, the mill burned. The brick company store still stands along with twenty or so haggard rent houses that line State Road 1002 as it meanders uphill toward Interstate 40, a little over a mile away. In 2011, a film company chose Henry River as the location for the protagonist’s childhood home in the first Hunger Games movie. Interest in the site sky rocketed. Individuals and tour groups made the location a destination. What had been a popular spot for photographers and those with an interest in local and regional history now became a part of pop culture. The poems in this volume reflect on the historical Henry River with some reference to the intrusive forces of the film industry. Some are responses to photographs; others are based on stories that Henry River natives have shared with me, while some are sheer flights of fancy. All of them, however, share an empathy and reverence for those who lived and worked in Henry River. (continued below).
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252 pages Trade Paper 6 X 9 ISBN 978-1-929878-68-0
By Joseph Gardner
This book of poems was written for people who normally wouldn’t read poetry. Through these stories you are taken on a forty year journey that began during the height of the cold war and carries onto the new millennium; from one side of the country to the other. Nothing is hidden in these words, all the veneer is stripped away to show the beautiful vulgarity that is life and humanity. These poems read like the pink slip the foreman just handed you or the three day pay or quit notice tacked to the door of the apartment. It is the beeping of the repo-truck and the sudden surprise of the electricity being turned off. It is the first kiss, the first fight, and the first divorce. — Timothy Spencer Poems like “Paying Rent,” In the Shadow of the Bomb,” and “Bar Fighting with Mullets,” demonstrate both his matter of fact ethic and his combination of humor and pathos. Gardner can use the same 16-line poem to make you laugh and make you pause for a moment. The geography of Gardner’s imagination is the California of Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie, Bukowski and Tom Waits. Family memories are recounted and childhood heroes populate the poems. The vocabulary is everyday life and Gardner’s objective is to show you the world through his eyes. — Mike “The Poet” Sonksen
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ISBN 9781929878079 302 pages 8.5 x 8.5 inches; Perfect Bound
By Ryan Guth
When the deaths of her ex-convict father and pedophile grandfather trigger a flood of repressed sex-abuse memories from her childhood, divorcee Cassandra Hart descends into alcoholism and destructive sexual relationships, until repeated DUI convictions finally land her in a court-ordered treatment facility. There she begins – reluctantly at first – the hard work of physical and psychological recovery. As she learns to trust her own spiritual inclinations and her capacity for self-reinvention, she is ultimately able to reclaim her life and achieve a long-delayed moral victory over her abusers. Within this narrative framework of verse, prose, and other hybrid forms, author Ryan Guth has interspersed other lyrics exploring the quintessentially southwestern mix of Hispanic, Anglo and Pueblo lore which informs Cassandra’s personal theology and sense of self.Featured Title at the 2015 Southern Festival of Books
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ISBN 978-1-929878-77-2 92 PAGES; 6 x 9; Trade Paper
By Lawrence Welsh and John Macker
I have waited a long time to publish these two poets. When I first broached the subject of publishing a collection of poetry by John Macker, I had no idea that it would also include the work of the gifted (and award winning) poet Lawrence Welsh. These two men, one from Santa Fe, New Mexico and one from El Paso, Texas, have been pivotal in creating a school of Southwestern Poetry which was inspired by the likes of Tony Scibella and Tony Moffeit. This is a solid, 50 poem collection. All stand alone poems, yet all linked to each other as if pointing out the intrinsic influence of both the people's and landscape that unites these two poets. New Mexico is aptly named "the land of enchantment" and it has served as a backdrop for this fantastic page turner! You won't be disappointed!"In this collaboration, you'll find two completely different ways to put words on the page. I was Larry's idea to join forces, so to speak, to present differing styles right next to each other, up close and personal, to communicate not just a vision, but an assemblage of visions. We realize that part of our job description is to, as Lorca explained, break open the pomegranite (the English language translation for Lorca's beloved Granada), and discover 'the blood of the wounded earth.' Its passions and mysteries." — from the Introduction by John Macker.
