Home » Newpages Blog » Shanti Arts Publishing

New Book :: In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind

In the Museum of My Daughter's Mind by Marjorie Maddox and Anna Lee Hafer book cover image

In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind by Marjorie Maddox and Anna Lee Hafer
Shanti Arts, May 2023

In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind is a collaboration of poetry by Marjorie Maddox and art by her daughter Anna Lee Hafer, inspirited by a rainy-day excursion when Maddox and Hafer visit the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. As never before, they realized how their passions for art and poetry intersect. With this exhibit and Hafer’s own surreal paintings as inspiring backdrop, they exchanged their responses to joy and trauma more deeply—artist to artist, mother to daughter. These connections between poet and visual artist constitute the core of this ekphrastic collection. In addition, Maddox includes nine poems based on work she saw that day by Antar Mikosz, Greg Mort, Margaret Munz-Losch, Ingo Swann, and Christian Twamley, as well as several later collaborations with Karen Elias.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

New Book :: Gauntlet in the Gulf

Gauntlet in the Gulf edited by Claude Clayton Smith book cover image

Gauntlet in the Gulf: The 1925 Marine Log and Mexican Prison Journal of William F. Lorenz, MD edited by Claude Clayton Smith
Shanti Arts Publishing, March 2023

Lorenz Hall at the Mendota Mental Health Institute in Madison, Wisconsin, is named for William F. Lorenz, the man who first observed, in 1916, that chemistry could treat the mentally ill. Professor of neuropsychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Lorenz developed the fledgling Psychiatry Department while engaged in his ground-breaking research. In 1925, seeking a much-needed respite, he signed on with the Ruth, a fishing smack out of Pensacola, Florida, for a working vacation in the Gulf of Mexico. The Ruth struck a reef, the ship was abandoned, and the crew was rescued from perilous seas by a Mexican Navy vessel, only to be imprisoned as spies, smugglers, gun-runners, and for fishing in illegal waters. Dr. Lorenz’s diary details their ordeal.

To discover more great books from small, independent, and university presses, visit the NewPages Guide to Publishers as well as the New Books category on our blog. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date!

Book Review :: Loss/Less by Rebecca A Durham

Loss/Less poetry by Rebecca A. Durham published by Shanti Arts book cover image

Guest Post by Jami Macarty

The beautifully sounded, ecologically aware, and botanically influenced poems of Loss/Less, Rebecca A. Durham’s second collection, is, to my read, not so much interpretive of loss related to climate crisis, but intends to be reconciliatory: “This is how I enter the forest & this is how it enters me too.” Combining the geological and botanical with the plaintiff and ecstatic, the collection conjures Rumi and Thoreau. One way to read the book is as one long poem, an epistle to Thoreau, challenging his words “nothing could defile this pond.” The poet wonders if the transcendentalist knew that was a “lie.” Is Durham a new transcendentalist in her asking “what kind of extinction is this”; in her call for “a moratorium on cement or at least errant elements”; her command “uncut / all those holy trees”; her recognition that “we are illicitly complicit in disaster”? Like Thoreau, perhaps even if Durham knows it is already “too late,” her poems insist:

this is how we kneel
at the hemlock

pulled back
from the brink

pulled back from the helm
of helplessness, hatred

(from “Arboreal Burial,” 77)

Call to action, educational primer, love song, the poet calls on the many gestures of poetry, creating if not an abundance, less loss. What remains? Loess, a windblown sediment, or as the poet writes: “I gather bitter fruits / map my fissures.” What else is there as “we are primed for decay’s reticent elegance.” A special and compelling book!

Loss/Less by Rebecca A Durham. Shanti Arts Publishing, January 2022.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems are forthcoming.If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.