Victoria Fotios is a poet and author who currently divides her time between London and her family in Hampshire.  She was Online Poet of the Year 2008 and has been published collaboratively, most recently in Candy by NeoPoesis Press (2009).  Sunday Morning Spiders is her first poetry collection.

(excerpt)

Pegs

I have no right to be amused.
I am the one standing naked
with a tea pot in my hand;

but I cannot chase the twist from my mouth
as I watch my neighbour
co-ordinate her clothes pegs
to her washing.

So careful is she
that I think she cannot be happy
but, this soothes her
and who the hell am I to wonder
if it reveals a mind and heart
unfulfilled?

It’s half past 11 in the morning.
I have been awake since the fox nudged my door.
I have not washed the night from me,
have not evacuated the bed of me,
not so much as opened the French doors
for fresh air.

She is happy with her rainbow of laundry.
I make my tea,
walk past my wash hamper;

I don’t need clothes today
anyway.

From the Introduction

“There is a gentle revelation that comes with the gift of another’s carefully crafted vision; with these poems, there is not a sense of the hypocrisy of a vicarious experience, there is a sense of shared consequence. Her words draw us into a world where a certain shaping of the imagination is required to enter the portal.”

- Amanda Joy, poet, sculptor, installation artist and songwriter, author of Not Enough to Fold

Reviews

“When I first came across Victoria Fotio’s poetry I knew I had found a poet I would read and enjoy for many years. Her very English slightly off-centre poetry reminds me of Larkin at his best. “Pegs” is and always will be one of my favourite ever poems. This is a collection not to be missed. “

- Si Philbrook, poet, published in various journals including Poetry Monthly (UK)

“A beautiful insight into a life that is conveyed with breathtaking poignancy. The secret moments, emotions and scenes that are weaved throughout this collection have an intimacy that is compelling. Refreshing honesty and imagery that effortlessly transports the reader into another’s life. Victoria Fotios paints pictures with her words. “
- Kiersty Boon, author of Walking On Chalk and The Poet Busker

(excerpt)

electra

Do not include me
in your wayward fondling.
I was rampant beneath these sheets
before
your hands shifted towards my warmth.
Swarming about a fragile frame -
blame riddled bone shafts
hollowed out until concave -
overworked.

I am Electra.

I dance naked underneath the moon
cold – blue skinned.
Slimmed to starved I am consuming
self centered cells -
melded maligned to divinity.
Your overwhelming urge to claim
girls as your own blood
floods my mouth

I am drowning.

Let me lay silent in your arms
as you pander the ample curve
of flesh.
Beneath shallow breath I am leaving.
Free, I shall slip from your embrace,
with grace I shall leave.

I am your biology.

Bound with fists and flushed passion
fashioned from Freud’s own text.
Watch me I am burning -
ash lifting into blood red skies,
I am spread sprawling bawling
spawning a multitude stillborn lies.

I am my own complex.

I am Electra.

Samantha Ledger is a poet and photographer currently living on the outskirts of London.  She is the author of Everybody Else’s Girl, and her work has been featured in numerous publications including Up the Staircase, Heroin Love Songs, Osprey Journal, Luciole Press and ETC: A Review of General Semantics.  Bells for Her is Ledger’s second collection of poetry.

Reviews

“Ledger’s approach to abuse and the patriarchal oppression of the feminine is never treated with pseudo-heroism or self-victimisation; rather her poems are strikingly honest and core-cutting, depicting love-hate relationships and painful ties. With effective, emotive accuracy, Ledger bravely explores the scope of rage, injustice, damage and sacrifice to appease and expiate the need of the perpetrator as well as the masochism of the abused – something not many have the courage to approach so openly.”

- Petra Whiteley, author of The Nomads Trail and The Moulding of Seers

“What is immediately noticeable when reading Bells for Her is its unflinching intimacy.  Equal parts warm and torturous, tender then disturbed, it encompasses the full gamut of contemporary life and human emotions. Bells for Her is the poetic equivalent of a woman laid bare, beckoning you with all her power.”

- A.D. Hitchin, author of Holy Hermaphrodite

(excerpt)

The Open Road of Your Bookcase

When a man has nothing but his
name and a mouthful of words, no
money just personal hate and inner
famine, when the road opens up in
front of his old beat up shoes, the
possibilities become limitless. The
cynics and elitists vanish. Those
doubt soaked ladies become tiny
incidents. The memories decide not
to pan out and the jobs could be
anything: fisherman, lumberjack,
miner, store clerk, or the priest
of a lonely heart.

The road is experience and truth.
It’s the place of one thousand ghosts.
It becomes the palace of your open
mast (the one you simplify with true
grit and courage.) When a man has
simple things like notebooks, pens,
selected music, and powerful works
from the typewriter, he can see people
stripped to the bone. He can see a
man’s blood pump on the outside. He
can tell what comfort really does for
the people of the arm chair relax. Art
never had a bigger challenge than that
of true passion taken by feet that truly
need to see the earth.

To see and to meet, to plunge the
knife in deeply, to taste and to seek.
I shall gain this knowledge by rafting
across the great colony of despair and
seeing the real suffering. The real deal
all over, not to look within the same
walls of one, two, or three towns, I shall
listen to similar winds across the plains
of my own sorrows and gain the slick
confidence that most will not even
attempt to try. I’m not better or worse,
but I seek formal gain and a card
player’s smile. When I leave your
town I will open my brain and suck in
your truths, and before I leave upon this
road again, I shall leave myself upon
the shelves of your bookcase.

Frank Reardon has published several poetry collections including Cancer Face, Exorcism Of The Con-Artist and Rival Tongues.  His work has appeared in such magazines and webzines as New York Quarterly, Quillbillies, Black Listed, Epic Rites, Denver Syntax and Kill Poet.  Interstate Chokehold is his first major collection.  Frank currently lives in North Dakota and is working on his first novel.

Reviews

“Frank Reardon is a truly exceptional young poet currently rising up from the bowels of the internet. One could compare his work to prominent street poets of past generations, but it would be unfair to lump him in with anyone, for his work has no problem standing on its own merit.”

- John Dorsey, Teaching the Dead to Sing (Rose of Sharon Press)

“Frank Reardon works words like a hungry young prize fighter, creating  killer combinations that produce knock out verse.  A real contender, the kid’s a triple threat with heart, style and class.  An up and comer to be reckoned with.”

- S.A. Griffin, Co-Editor, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry

“Frank Reardon is a prophet, word brawler and unapologetic caller of society’s bullshit.  His words are brutally honest and can take you places you didn’t know existed or weren’t comfortable traveling to alone.  One of the best voices of our generation.”

- Richard Daley, Co-Founder / Co-Editor, Off Beat Pulp Magazine

“Frank Reardon is a heart beating through impenetrable odds.  His writing reaches into your skin, grabs your bones and asks you to dive head first off the cliffs of fear and fragility into the vulnerable sky of our empathetic space and time.  Reardon is a carnival barker of the big tent show of love.  His terrain is large and small at the same time.  His language is a river and you swim in it until you reach the ocean of who you are.”

- Scott Wannberg, Strange Movie Full of Death (Perceval Press)

” There is no one I know of in poetry right now that is as original with language as Frank Reardon.”
- A.G.N.I Review

“Always a pen in hand and a woman on his mind, Frank’s poems are like smashing your face into a mirror and then reflecting on what just happened;  looking at yourself in the few shards that remain.”

- Jason Hardung, The Broken and the Damned (Epic Rites Press)

* This book includes an audio recording of the poets reading their work.

From the Introduction

The complex relationship between masculine and feminine, explored consistently throughout the history of poetry, offers fertile ground for collaborative creation. In discussion of the inherent possibilities we realized with astonishment that, in a milieu where authenticity is venerated as a hallmark of quality, the lion’s share of published poems exploring this duality have been written from a singular rather than a dialogical perspective. The poems in this collection represent a resultant ongoing effort to break free from the bonds of such limitations; specifically, this is a collection of poetic dyads (responsorials) intended to reveal the myriad facets of the masculine/feminine adventure.

- Rich Follet and Constance Stadler

Rich Follett is an actor, musician and teacher who has recently returned to writing poetry after a thirty-year hiatus. A founding member of the Shenandoah Valley’s premiere  poetry group The Aubade Circle, his work has been published in several issues of Paraphilia and Calliope Nerve and in a ‘Featured Poet’ capacity at Counterexample Poetics. Rich has been repeatedly recognized for his artistry in spoken word, most notably at the inaugural summer poetry festival in Middletown, Virginia and on blog talk radio. The poet Duane Locke has publically recognized the excellence of his poetic artistry.

Constance Stadler has been writing, publishing, and editing poetry from the “prehistoric” epoch of print journals to modern e-times. She was a former editor of South and West and is currently a contributing editor to the e-zine Eviscerator Heaven and Review Editor for Calliope Nerve. She has published over 300 poems and three chapbooks in her ‘first manifestation’ as a poet, and has just released her first two chaps in 20 years, Tinted Steam (Shadow Archer Press) Sublunary Curse (Erbacce) and an eBook, Paper Cuts (Calliope Nerve Media).

Her most recent work appears in such ‘zines as BlazeVox, ditch, ken*again, Pen Himalaya, Rain Over Bouville, Clockwise Cat, Unlikely Stories 2.0, Hanging Moss, Neonbeam, and Gloom Cupboard. Recently, she has been “Featured Poet” for the  Guild of Outsider Writers, Counterexample Poetics and The Poetry Warrior.

Artwork

The artwork included in this publication has been created by Steve Viner. Steve Viner lives in Dorset, UK, with his wife, Donna, and daughter, Athene. He has illustrated several chapbooks for Shadow Archer Press, including Tinted Steam for Constance Stadler, with another cover to be released in the near future. Steve has had work shown in The Glasgow Review as well as various other e-zines and has held a successful Exhibition in the UK.

Learn more about Steve Viner HERE

Reviews

“Alterity attracts. Attracts, especially when the binary opposites are the masculine and the feminine. James Joyce, in Dubliners, has a character make the observation of the masculine-feminine relationship that a man can never befriend a woman because he will always want to have sex with her. In From Here to Eternity, James Jones has a character make a similar observation: after a convivial, congenial philosophic conversation, she says to the man, “What all this means is that you want me to take off my dress.” I have found one of the best descriptions of love in Rainer Maria Rilke, “Love is the cherishing of each other’s solitude.”

This book of poems, Responsorials, is not only exciting for its poetic art, but also for  its diverse responses to this alterity of man and woman. The reader will be moved by the sentiments, surprised, and enlightened.”

- Duane Locke, author of 21 books of poetry and recipient of The Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize, The Charles Agnoff Award, and The Poetry Society of America’s Walt Whitman Award

“The masculine-feminine dynamic is one of contrast, balance and enhancement. In Responsorials, Constance Stadler and Rich Follett have captured beautifully the inherent vulnerability and strength within each through a tender exchange of words. These are not only the intertwining of gender perspectives but also a mutual nourishment…the one to the other. It is not merely the romance of two souls; it extends much further, exploring roles and relationships between men and women which may be circumstantial, intense or fleeting. It is a subtle interplay which goes far to highlight gender difference without reducing it to mere simplistic dichotomy. The richness and beauty of language from both poets cannot be underestimated: this is writing of the highest order, probing the deepest corners of us all.”

- Gillian Prew, author of standing still in motion and the idea of wings

“In this profound collection, the often complex interactions between male and female archetypes are explored in the rich poetic language of both traditional and contemporary roles. A must-read for anyone who loves language and the exploration of (yin and yang) male and female within.”

- Maria Gornell, poet, published in the Shoots and Vines all female anthology I Can’t Be Your Virgin and Your Mother

“Rich Follett and Constance Stadler introduce us in Responsorials to both a poetic collaboration and an exploration of the intimate interface between people who come together in the mysterious terrains of coupling: creative coupling in that the poets themselves are engaged in a shared process, and literal coupling in the sense that the poems themselves reflect the dynamics of people coming together in different forms, where personae and dialogue are devices in a process of unmitigated exchange.

Interesting that the poets mention authority, and the desire to diminish it. This goal very much echoes their take on gender, as this state of co-validity: In these poems, the poets want to avoid staking claims on authority just as this version of gender co-validity avoids comparisons but rather sees strength in the disparate voices, permitted to exist alongside.”

- Lynn Alexander, poet and co-editor of Full of Crow

“The exceptional collection Responsorials illustrates an extraordinary greatness, one of mimetic chanting from two equally dynamic vantage points by two rarities of the poetic world. Together, Constance Stadler and Rich Follett are not at odds here, as is functional and fashionable within the dysfunctional state of neoteric marriages; rather, these two exceptional human beings are in harmonious serenity – outlining experiences of self and others through mysterious connection and understanding of emotional occurrences seen and unseen through the eyes of existential a priori.

This collection is highly recommended for its language of philosophical poetry and for its coverage of the human status, one of equivalence to comprehension regarding relationships gathered in the literal and poetic definitions handwritten by these two gifted poets.”

- Felino Soriano, author of ten books of poetry, including the newly released Apperceptions of Reinterpretations (Calliope Nerve Media) and editor of Counterexample Poetics

“In drunken rage I once screamed a responsorial in a Catholic Church that cannot be reprinted for the sake of decency and, well, common sense. Reading Responsorials, by Constance Stadler and Rich Follett, I never felt the need to stand up and tell the priest … I mean … the writers, my ‘deepest thoughts.’ This is a collection of poems that will keep the reader riveted, focused and eager to turn the page. It is a give and take, a delicate dance, a lover’s gaze, a back alley deal of pure celebration. Its perspective between male and female is not to be missed and is utterly well done.”

- Jack Henry, author of with the patience of monuments

This publication may be purchased at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and many other online booksellers.

Visit our website www.neopoiesispress.com for more information.

Amulet Cypher, David Arshawsky’s first collection of poetry, is frequently abstract, continually unexpected and permeates the reader’s imagination with the most inspiring of images and concepts. The inclusion of a selection of his accomplished and unique artwork makes this book a welcome addition to any collection.

David Arshawsky has designed and sculpted many toy lines including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Star Trek and Earthworm Jim. An artist who has worked in cake design, sculpture, painting, illustrating and more, he is now sharing his gift for writing poetry.

Learn more about this author HERE

Foreword to Amulet Cypher

I have been told that before I could talk, I was mapping out unseen
worlds with crayon or pencil. Labyrinths, peopled on paper, was
how I played. Art has always been the framework for how I
experience the mystery, by working in decorating, illustrating and
sculpting cakes, as a portrait artist, book illustrator, toy sculptor
and designer, and always through writing. Much of my time has
been behind the scenes, anonymous, accruing a huge body of
work, and stepping out of the shadows now feels right.

The computer has fit right in as a tool in this journey. I remember
when I first found the online art groups. There were people from
all over the world, posting work and critiquing and commenting.
These things we do, we do in the dark and frequently alone. They
reflect private, secret worlds and often, will go unseen and
unheard. Here bloomed a community, beyond the locality of
borders and style, both friendly and contentious, but vibrant and
challenging. The artists, poets and writers I have met have
changed and stretched my world. It has given me a space to
make a ritual of writing and drawing every day.

I am sure that art is a magical pursuit. The time spent
experimenting, learning and practicing, at first brings you along
incrementally and then suddenly comes the quantum leaps into
mysterious yet personal revelations and visions. Doors open and
you peer onto the long, strange landscapes of your mind.

David Arshawsky

Excerpt From Amulet Cypher

Sight

Pried from sap or sediment
or tears and sentiment,
my vision blurs to the light,
bends crystals like amulet cyphers.
And I thought you stood over my bed
in yesterday’s shadows
and scent deserted flowers.
I squint to see you in shards of light,
pray for day to leave
the dark to sheathe
my sun blind world.
Pass away to see
you here next to me.

Jack Henry lives in the high desert of SE California.  Published in numerous journals, he also has six chapbooks to his name.  with the Patience of Monuments is his first full length collection of poetry.  Jack Henry is the pen name of Thomas Kenney.

Reviews of with the Patience of Monuments

“Jack Henry’s writing is the real deal. No bullshit, no posing. This is essential American literature.”

- Tony O’Neill, author/poet, Down and Out on Murder Mile (Harper Perennial)

“Jack Henry slammed me in the face.
I have always admired Jack’s writing, his fearless self-revelations combined with a world-view that is equal parts jaded and hopeful. What knocked me off my feet in his first full-length collection, with the patience of monuments, is the way he turns himself inside out, and then goes down a little deeper, moves in a bit closer, and, just as you think he’s in for the kill, suddenly…a gentle word, a line so of such graceful beauty you get, well, slammed in the face. Again.
Great writing always includes the element of surprise, whether it’s a sucker punch or a spiked drink. This is a book that opens with the line:

a single note destroyed me

tells us who he is and who he’s not in the second poem (very next breath)

perhaps i’m like Jesus
during those middle years
and, further on,
there’s a chance i am just a mirror
broken on the floor in a symphony of single shards

thereby introducing the underlying spiritual/religious theme, and the overlying one, in which he provides a mirror not only into his own soul but into the reader’s. Looking deeply into the mirror is where I got slammed in the face and started to bleed; where I recognized the need in myself to gather the courage to throw myself onto the page like a maniac bungee jumper, no net, only a belief and love of the process and a little bit of faith in the outcome.
Part of the uniqueness of the work is the brilliance of the surprise. Airport meetings, commuter bus fucks, Speak East Taverns, bitter circus, and, right in the mix, the sweet fragility of lives lived with love (absolved of nothing but trying):

i take her hand, kiss her,
make her blush with a particular
whisper, one have that
is only for her…

It took several readings before I finished the collection. I had to stop, absorb, and bandage a few new bruises. Anybody can write about someone else, anybody can even write about themselves, dancing along surfaces filled with imagery and amusement. I was overcome with the journey into self, which shoved me, hard, into myself.
This is a book you need to hold in your hands, feel the weight of the man who lives within; it is not an e-book or a kindle or a flickering screen. I am going to do that wearing a little less body armor and a deeper understanding of why we do this at all.
Maybe somewhere there is still “a bookstore on Bleecker Street” and we can celebrate as Jack does:

on Sunday we went to a cathedral,
ate church in the back row,
sang songs by the Ramones
when everybody knelt to pray…

- Puma Perl, Belinda and her Friends (Erbacce Press)

“Jack Henry marches across the desert with one eye on the ground and one on the Beat heavens, unafraid of his own pain or humiliation, fearful for our communal future. Continuing the great tradition of American poetry that runs from Whitman through McKay and Ginsberg and Bukowski, he prefers the raw to the cooked, the unborn to the dead, and roads with little signage.”

- Tom Lutz, Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America (FSG)

“If all the drug deals, pawnshop exchanges, and alley-way beatitudes could find their confessional booth, With The Patience of Monuments might be the stenographer’s transcript. This book is not for the innocent, unless it is their time for initiation. Herein you will find an infested wooden rollercoaster tempting tragedies, the eyes of New Orleans’ gargoyles always watching, the light at the end of a sewer tunnel, a priest shooting dope. In his intro, Jack Henry, responding to the fact that his editor called his book “religious” or “spiritual”, plaintively states, “…it’s a tax write-off and I can piss off another priest.” However, in one poem, Jack Henry states that he does not piss on “the back walls of a sacred place.” The sacred erupts within the profane in this collection, and vice versa, but both are respected by a poet who does not write, by his own admittance, to get into heaven or into hell, or to get out of either one of them.”

- Joe Milford, poet/writer, host, the joe milford radio show

“Many contemporary poets appear to hide behind the façade of “poetic language”, using this subjective brand of tongue to provide abundance of unnecessary metaphor and to conjure within the reader a brand of reality irrelevant to the rising actuality enveloping absolute existence. Jack Henry is no such poet. His language reveals a reality based on the existential definition of self-made milieu, providing avenues of his visited and revisited happenstance to be italicized in an antiquated world of the quotidian humdrum. “With the Patience of Monuments” declares that this poet is a being of awareness, aware of core human emotions, both the delightful and scornful, and excavates even further an emotional read from those interlocking their vision with the images ascending from the page: “i no longer move / when your words / cry, when your squalor / rises and steals your breath, / when the abyss bridges / front to back and lies / become the fodder / of a morning meal.

This collection will become a grand standard of poetry for subsequent poets wishing to attach to humans’ proclaimed universal emotions, and thus, defining itself within the conceptual reality that Henry acts as a reflectional base of an utmost observer of the human condition.”

- Felino Soriano, Apperceptions of Reinterpretations (Calliope Nerve Media)

“jack henry’s large heart, a veteran of wars, accidents, fears, madness, disillusion, is, in these 80 different dance halls of image and sound, breaking invisible bread with jesus as the latter downs his meds with shots of tequila, while on the corner of 6th and Los Angeles streets the meteor of hope has crashed into Obama’s tag team and the churches of the sky are rolling across clouds of Charlie Parker’s smoke.

jack henry is a knight, vassal, cowboy, dancer, fortune teller who sometimes can’t find his crystal ball, but eventually discovers his eyes, ears, and heart are more powerful than atomic weapons and paranoia.

the guards of everything may feel they know his name, but there are rooms inside his music that they will never be able to access. if castles do fall in each pause, motion, which is jack’s nickname, builds a new front porch made of sway, and dreams that are matinees in old theaters suddenly become crisp new lucid prints forever being viewed in the moment of our attempted lives.

jack henry finally is an ongoing process and this collection of visions, memory, hope, pain, and kickass music, will see you through to your own morning where little birds sing and ring with great enthusiasm, and the dead woman in the corner of a rich man’s eyes will ride again across the landscape of jack’s saxophone.”

- Scott Wannberg, Strange Movie Full of Death, (Perceval Press)

“Jack Henry’s poetry is very much engaged with life and not scared to address issues that many of us prefer not to talk about. Many of the poems bring us encounters with people who are often overlooked by poets. There are many poems here about Los Angeles, its bookshops and pawn shops, churches, liquor stores and rivers. Poems about family, love lost and re-found, connections made, addiction, need and unemployment, US and world politics. He is sometimes angry, as in three lines in:

perhaps if you buried
yourself
into a mound of
red ants you might understand
feeling

though he can also be lyrical as in N’Orleans mornings:

houses where ghosts
play cards and remember
through trees whispering
on forgotten wind
Spanish moss plays
gentle tricks on my thoughts

A lot of the poems are full of rich detail such as the bookstore on Bleeker Street:

she had a one-eyed cat
with a bent tail and Tourettes syndrome
that ate tuna from the can and
old artichoke hearts on a chipped plate

Jesus appears in many of these poems, and in Jesus of Los Angeles has his own series of poems and he could be anyone, which is of course the point.

This is not poetry for those of a nervous disposition or those who are easily offended but I can wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone else.

- Juliet Wilson, poet/writer/editor, Bolts of Silk

If you know the work of Jack Henry, then there is no point me trying to sound intelligent with a fancy ass review of his new full length book—with the Patience of Monuments because you will buy it anyway, and if you don’t know Jack’s poetry—the question is why not?

I will say I read through 137 pages of insight and passion set to the page as poetry. The only thing better would have been to hear him read it. I can’t put a finger on a favorite, there are too many. And with the diversity of this collected work, it may just depend on the mood of the reader at any given time. This is the kind of book I will pick up and discover something new with each read. So, pulling out a quote or two to illustrate his talent would be an injustice to the rest of the book.

- Scot Young, poet/writer/editor, Outsider Writers/Rusty Truck/Deuce Coupe -

“With the patience of monuments“, Jack Henry takes his unique style and propels it skywards. To read him, is to read a life lived with all its softness and all its brutalities. Raging truth in verse that steeps is a hallmark, as is the casually epic:

“a single note destroyed me
As easily as Hitler destroyed Europe”

from Em or F# on a slide trombone.

His descriptions can be lush and seductive as in N’orleans mornings:

“Spanish moss plays
gentle tricks
on my thoughts
you, me velvet kisses
stolen before gargoyle
eyes where my hands rest
gentle upon supple curve
linger through moments …”

But suddenly we are pushed out of the doors of a seducing dreamscape:

“she’s alive and screaming”

As the author acknowledges in the forward, the struggle with religious-spiritualism is a linchpin of the collection. In sublimation he explores historic social stereotypes and landmark discrimination in describing a 50’s suburban housewife, a black man working as a porter, circa 1963, and a gay man cuffed at Stonewall, there is one more ‘sublimation’:

“i am Christ on the cross, wind in my hair
women at my feet, crying and chanting, waiting on a spear of
a Roman soldier, watching the sun drift across the sky, waiting
for eternity, wondering if returning might not be an option,
wishing I had taken more time, but knowing that destiny is not mine

nor will it be.”

This may well be the quintessential image of this stunning collection. Beautiful verse philosophically ruminations on meaning as seen through the eyes of a knowing, weathered self. This is a richness that pours like aged bourbon, burning and coating as it slides down into your very core.

- Connie Stadler, Paper Cuts (Calliope Nerve)

“Jack Henry steps beyond the page in his newest collection of poetry. In the forward to with the patience of monuments he speaks of the thread that holds the book together, and in his poems he is Christ and Pilate and the spear thrust between his own ribs all at once. In one of the first poems of the collection he claims “…i’m no Ezra Pound” but he comes close poem after poem. In the poem “three lines in” I can almost hear him screaming the lines at his computer screen after another failed attempted to mimic rhyme schemes and pastural verse has found its way into his inbox or onto his bookshelf for approval. The love poems hidden in the pages of this collection are a kiss full of sour-mash and cigarettes that linger on your lips long after the cover is closed. These poems are a desert fairytale, a siren’s song, a bum’s final words, a whore’s spread legs, a discarded needle, a lie whispered in the dark. These poems a reminder of my own addictions.”

- Gail Kelley, poet/writer

“Jack Henry writes with a measured authority. It’s about time that this authority stretched itself across a large body of work. Writing like this comes along infrequently and that, makes it all the more valuable. Henry writes at times like a driven machine, pumping the right words out at the right times and in the right order. What is it that they say about the best poetry being the best words in the best order…?”

- Dr. Andrew Taylor, co-editor and publisher, erbacce and erbacce-press

“Jack Henry has hit a nerve, a human one that runs through all of us whether we like it or not. Henry Miller once wrote that the only journey worth taking was the one that goes inside, that delves into our own nasty miasma and pokes, prods, reveals who we really are. Jack goes there. There is so much humanity in most of his poems that it is hard to read in one sitting, rather, a reader needs to fill the double shot-glass with Jack, swig him down, let him blur the vision and pump the gonads, then go back for more. His plain verse and honest expressions are part of a building wave in the poetic world, the real crashing over the effete, the brutal sawing at the pretend, and Jack is right there, the biting end of that tsunami. If you are writhing in your own barbed wire and want company, buy the book. We can all twist together.”

- David E. Oprava, publisher, Grievous Jones

“Jack Henry’s poetic voice speaks here again with mastery and precision. The poems in this collection are raw and powerful, probably dangerous. They resist neutering and do not bow to the whorish gods of psychological profit and normalization that the feeble seek in their therapy, their “poetry.” These poems will cut you, then rifle through your wallet. But they will also reveal vulnerability and humanity while so doing. This is a book you need.”

- David McLean, Hellbound (Epic Rites Press), A Hunger for Mourning (Erbacce Press), Poems Against Enlightenment, La Morte Vivante (Shadow Archer Pres), Of Dead Snakes, Rain Over Bouville, nobody wants to go to heaven but everybody wants to die (Poptritus Press), Cadaver’s Dance, (Whistling Shade Press), Pushing Lemmings

Candy:  A Collection to Satisfy Your Sweetest Cravings, is an eclectic collection which ranges from the romantic to the taboo and from the intimate to the voyeuristic.  With sensitivity, passion and at times humor, these poems capture the delights of sex, sexuality, love, lust and fantasy.

List of Poets Included in this Collection

David Arshawsky

Frank Axworthy

Amanda Baker

Erin Badough

BlackMarket

Nadine Clayton

Anna Donovan

bruce dorlova

José E. del Rosario

Melissa A. Delise

T.K. Ellington

Michael Farris

Nicole Ficco

Victoria Fotios

Jason Freiman

Brenda  Patricia Garza

Shirley Hall

Ross Hamilton Hill

Samantha Ledger

Neil McCrea

Barbara W. McGrory

Bruce Millar

Joed Miller

Curt Murphy

Mary Celeste Nyberg

Courtney Ray

Seb

Urban Schrott

Glenda Shaw-Garlock

Annette Stenslien

Lance Strate

Steve Szewczok

Carol Voccia

Michelle Warner

Jenny Wear

Jonathon Derrick Wilson

Dale Winslow

From the Introduction

Painters and sculptors frequently turn to the human body as a subject, so that the nude is a commonplace in museums and art galleries. The artist’s interest in the outer form of women and men as aesthetic, biological, and sexual beings is paralleled by the poet’s concern with the body as topic, and as metaphor (some say the source of all metaphor). As we move from figure studies to figures of speech, we find the poet employing verbal description of the body, and its activities, both profound and profane, and perhaps more significantly, explorations of an interior landscape in which drives and desires, as well as passion and romance, play no small part. Sensual perception, musky memory, and sexual imagination all are vital parts of lived experience, a strange hybrid of that biological imperative that challenges self-control at every opportunity, and the higher mental and spiritual functions that elevate love, often beyond all other values and motivations, at times to the point of mystical experience. And this aspect of life is, therefore, a theme of great appeal for the poet, who seeks to answer the question, what does it mean to be human? To err is human, we are told, but it is no error to say that Eros is especially humanizing, hence the slogan from the sixties, make love, not war!

As a point of contrast, the art of the pornographer is a transparent one, both in the obvious aim of excitation and manipulation, but also in that the goal is to disguise the medium as much as possible, and generate the illusion of a direct and immediate, that is, unmediated experience. The art of erotic poetry is quite the opposite, as the poet’s purpose is for readers and listeners to attend to the words themselves, to pay heed to the language, the sound, and the style that is employed, to find aesthetic pleasure in the composition in and of itself, an aesthetic pleasure that reflects, rather than just presents or represents the actual pleasure of human sexuality. In other words, the gratification offered by the form of erotic poetry mirrors the gratification we may gain from its content. And so, we may admire the craft that went into the making of the poem, perhaps even dissect the technique, or we may, at the other extreme, find ourselves in a Pygmalion-like state of arousal, or a Narcissus-like state of narcosis. But above all, the erotic mirror that these poets have fashioned allows us to examine ourselves, our needs and our wants, our experiences and intentions, our minds and our bodies, in all their beauty, and in their unattractive aspects as well. In short, the mirror of Eros allows us to know ourselves, in all of our humanity.

This collection is aptly named, for candy is sweet, but can sometimes cause us pain, in the form of a bellyache, and sometimes leave us empty, in regard to calories and cavities alike. Candy is also candid, having the virtue of honesty, providing forthright appraisals of individuals, relationships, and our species as a whole (and suggesting that “we must cultivate our garden,” à la Candide). And most of all, Candy is a treat, one that has been lovingly crafted by our skilled confectioners, Erin Badough and Dale Winslow, who have put together this book con (that is, with) affection. As an edited collection, Candy is the product of collaboration, between the two editors, and among the thirty-seven poets included in this volume. Moreover, it is only fitting that this be the first work published by NeoPoiesis Press, itself a collaborative effort that I am pleased to be a part of, and a partnership that emerged out of the larger, looser collectivity that is the MySpace poetry community. This book is just the beginning of a series of publications that will feature a wide variety of styles, formats, topics and themes. It is just the beginning, and it is a very, very sweet beginning indeed!

- Lance Strate, author of Echoes and Reflections

Reviews

” ‘Speak to me/use only vowels,’ says one poet.  And yes, ecstatic vowels seem to be at the core of this multi-layered candy of a book.  Thankfully though the tongue must make its way through greatvarieties of deliciousness to get there.  A wonderful celebration of sexual textasy.”

-Robert Priest is the author of 15 books of poetry, the most recent being Reading the Bible Backwards, in addition to being a novelist, journalist, and songwriter.  He co-wrote the number one hit, “Song Instead of a Kiss,” for Alannah Myles, and wrote and performed (as “Dr. Poetry”) thirteen segments for CBC radio’s spoken-word show Wordbeat. www.poempainter.com.

“Candy is better than sweet – it’s a sensuous collection of metaphoric, metaphysical, pulsing, pounding, gentle, gossamer erotic poetry.   So why is my favorite title ‘There Is Nothing Better Than Sex in the Kitchen?’ “  Candy has something for every taste.”

-Paul Levinson, author of 5 novels including The Plot to Save Socrates, and The Pixel Eye, and 10 nonfiction books, is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University in New York City.  http://infiniteregress.tv/

“Desire is so necessary but it needs to be ignited.  Images, sounds, all of that work just fine but there’s something so sweet and pure about the written word.  There’s nothing like an honest recollection of a longing so palpable it almost seeps and blurs into the paper it’s being printed on.

That’s Candy.  This compilation of poetry is exactly what I’m talkin’ ’bout.  From Neil McCrea’s “Learning to Dodge Bullets,” with its vivid imagery of a surprising encounter with a brave new lover, to the blatant animal energy of Nicole Ficco’s “Doggystyle,” Candy is heated and hardened, sugary foreplay for anybody in need of some sweetness.”

-Jeanette Kantzalis, musician-songwriter-novelist.  www.myspace.com/abrokeheartpro
www.myspace.com/josephinetheoutlawking

“The poems in CANDY are fresh (in every sense of the word)tactile explorations of sensual minds, bodies and spaces.  Here readers will find fantasies to match and expand their own.  In an age that hypes the erotic  potential of new media, CANDY is a reminder that language itself remains our principal instrument of desire.”

-Joseph W. Slade, author of Pornography in America, the three volume reference work Pornography and Sexual Representation, and Thomas Pynchon (Writers for the 70′s series).