2513 Jackson Ave
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
USA
Join us for a reading from four accomplished Michigan poets! Charles W. Brice will present poetry from his newest book, Mnemosyne’s Hand, while Judith Alexander Brice is celebrating the release of her newest collection, Overhead from Longing. Monica Rico is an MFA candidate at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program and the author of Twisted Mouth of the Tulip; and rounding out the group is acclaimed Michigan Notable winning poet Keith Taylor, whose most recent book, The Bird-while, won the Bronze Award from the Foreword Indies Poetry Book of the Year for 2017.
About Mnemosyne’s Hand by Charles W. Brice
This collection deals with the challenges, dilemmas, joys, and struggles of living in a world that we often don’t want to live in, but don’t want to die in either. These poems explore the wonders of family, the horrors of war, racism, and prejudice against various minorities, as well as the heaps of hypocrisy our times produce, and the inevitability of the great equalizer-death.
Charles W. Brice is a retired psychoanalyst and is the author of Flashcuts Out of Chaos(WordTech Editions, 2016) and Mnemosyne’s Hand (WordTech Editions, 2018). His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Hawaii Review, The Main Street Rag, Chiron Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, SLAB, The Paterson Literary Review, Spitball, Plainsongs and elsewhere.
About Overhead from Longing by Judith Alexander Brice
Longing describes it all: the yearning for a “cradle of molten moonlight” to underpin the vicissitudes of daily life as we seek to watch “silken embers of sun topaz the sky.” In lyrical free verse and, at times, formal verse, Judith Alexander Brice depicts the treasured echoes of a life/our lives, even as they are interrupted by the vagaries of misfortune, illness and loss-and by the whims of our world.
Judith Alexander Brice, a retired Pittsburgh psychiatrist, has had poems published in many journals and newspapers including The Paterson Literary Review, Vox Populi.com,The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Versewrights.com, and Annals of Internal Medicine among others. Her first book, Renditions in a Palette, appeared in 2013. Her second book, Overhead From Longing, is brand new. One of her poems, Mourning Calls, was set to music by Tony Manfredonia.
Praise for Twisted Mouth of the Tulip
“How fine it is to have Monica Rico’s poems in the world. They are fierce, smart, fleshy and transcendent, animal and incarnate. Somewhere in Ms. Rico’s cloud of witnesses, Jim Harrison, hungry and hirsute, sits to the comida –a feast of gamy feeds, green shoots, buckets of wine and usquebaugh — tamales and cajeta, dulce de leche fresh from the word horde.” — poet, Tom Lynch
Monica Rico grew up in Saginaw, Michigan alongside General Motors and the legend of Theodore Roethke. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program and the author of Twisted Mouth of the Tulip (Red Paint Hill Publishing, 2017). Her poems have appeared in SiDEKiCK Lit, Dunes Review, Moonchild Magazine, The Ilanot Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Luna Luna, and Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse.
ISBN: Possible consignment
About The Bird-While by Keith Taylor
“A Bird-while. In a natural chronometer, a Bird-while may be admitted as one of the metres, since the space most of the wild birds will allow you to make your observations on them when they alight near you in the woods, is a pretty equal and familiar measure” (Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Journal, 1838).
Without becoming didactic or pedantic about the spiritual metaphor hidden in the concept of the “bird-while,” Keith Taylor’s collection evokes certain Eastern meditative poets who often wrote in an aphoristic style of the spirit or the mind mirroring specific aspects of the natural world.
Keith Taylor worked as a bookseller in Ann Arbor for more than twenty years, then taught in the undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs at the University of Michigan, and directed the Bear River Writers Conference. From 2010–2018 he worked as the Poetry Editor at Michigan Quarterly Review. He retired from the University of Michigan in 2018. He lives with his wife in Ann Arbor; they have one daughter.
His poems, stories, book reviews, translations and feature articles have appeared in many journals, magazines and newspapers in North America and in Europe, including The Chicago Tribune, The Iowa Review, The Los Angeles Times, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mondo Greco, Poetry Ireland Review, Poets and Writers, The Southern Review, etc. His work has also been included in anthologies and other books published by Oxford University Press, The University of Michigan Press, W.W. Norton, and others. He has also published a number of collections of his short stories and poetry, including the Michigan Notable winning book, Guilty at the Rapture.
