Craft: A Memoir by Tony Trigilio
Marsh Hawk Press, September 2023

Tony Trigilio’s Craft: A Memoir is an exploration of the writer’s craft through a series of short, linked personal essays. When writers talk about “craft,” they frequently focus on clinical, literary-dictionary terms such as language, narrative, structure, image, tone, and voice, among others. Craft: A Memoir is an effort to understand craft through discussions of the direct experience of writing itself—through stories of how Trigilio became a writer. Each chapter features an anecdote from the author’s development as a writer that illustrates craft elements central to his body of work.

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Creativity: Where Poems Begin
Nonfiction/Poetry by Mary Mackey
Marsh Hawk Press, September 2022

Mary Mackey’s Creativity: Where Poems Begin is a meditation on how the sources of creativity emerged from a vast, wordless reality and became available to a poet. As such, it is not only a memoir; it is an exploration of the power and process of becoming a poet. What is creativity? Where do creative ideas come from? What happens at the exact moment a creative impulse is suddenly transformed into something that can be expressed in words? To describe creativity is extraordinarily difficult because the moment of creation comes from a place where language does not exist and where the categories that determine what we see, hear, taste, and feel are not immediately present. In our daily lives, we tend to live on the surface, unaware of the complexity and richness of what lies below. Poetry creates itself, bubbling up from the depths until it reaches that part of our brains that transforms consciousness into words. Poetry chooses the poet. The poet did not choose it. This book is a journey to that place where all poems begin.

Steeple at Sunrise
Poetry by Burt Kimmelman
Marsh Hawk Press, November 2022

Burt Kimmelman’s new poems continue his exploration of syllabic forms. The book’s first section contains individual poems written in recent years, each standing on its own as a unique experience. “Plague Calendar,” which follows, consists of especially brief and understated poems presented in the order of their inception. They subtly chronicle an individual’s psychological endurance over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Together, person and landscape reveal a transformation in recent time, an individual’s experience of daily life. Steeple at Sunrise is Kimmelman’s eleventh collection of poems. His work is often anthologized and has been featured on National Public Radio. He has also published eleven books of criticism, most recently Visible at Dusk: Selected Essays and Zero Point Poiesis (a gathering of writings on George Quasha).

Plan B: A Poet’s Survivors Manual
Memoir by Sandy McIntosh
Marsh Hawk Press, June 2022

If you’re a poet, how are you going to survive if you can’t get a teaching job? McIntosh offers the answer: You need a Plan B if you want to put food on the table, wear shoes without holes in the soles, and stop living with roommates before you turn sixty. Taking readers through his own experiences in the world of commercial writing and publishing, McIntosh asserts that it is possible to have a successful career as a poet while holding down day jobs that make us better writers. Sandy McIntosh is publisher of Marsh Hawk Press. He has published fifteen collections of poetry and prose as well as three award-winning computer software programs.

Rasa
Poetry by Joanne Dominique Dwyer
Marsh Hawk Press, May 2022
ISBN: 978-0-9969912-7-8
Paperback, 94pp; $18

Winner of the 2021 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize chosen by David Lehman, RASA is Joanne Dominique Dwyer’s second collection of poems. Lehman noted that “Joanne Dominique Dwyer is an exceptionally talented poet, whose mind in motion on every page in Rasa gives pleasure. The author writes that ‘Intimacy means profoundly interior — / countless sets of keys and cryptic codes.’ The book is intimate in this sense. The author celebrates the power of the imagination to multiply metaphors, as in ‘Tarzan Audade,’ with its striking opening lines (‘It’s never a good sign when the patron saint / of betrothed couples is also the saint of the plague.’) and ‘No Alphabet,’ orchestrated by the reiterated ‘If not’ that begins the poem. The poet’s fruitful exchanges with Freud, in such poems as ‘To Charette with a Man,’ ‘Patron of Embalmers,’ and ‘Handsome Is as Handsome Does,’ delighted this reader.”