Sugartown Publishing

Sugartown Publishing is proud to feature its latest titles, hot off the press!

Truchas: Closer to Heaven, Poems by Chantal Guillemin



POETRY/TRAVEL

Sugartown Publishing

January 2015

ISBN: 978-0-9913870-9-0

$15.95

6x9, 116 pages

In the 1950s, Chantal Guillemin’s Southern California family visited New Mexico and succumbed to the enchanting beauty of the landscape, the breathtaking vistas and the people of a small town on the High Road between Taos and Santa Fe. Truchas, off the beaten track of most tourists’ travel plans, was where Guillemin’s family decided to put down roots, buying a small parcel on Llano Abeyta, a hamlet of Truchas. They moved a log barn next to an existing two-room house to create a house large enough for six children.

Truchas: Closer to Heaven is Guillemin’s homage to a place that continues to live in her heart and imagination, a place still unspoiled by rampant over-development where many cultures come together: the Tewa, Spanish and Mexican settlers, and Norte Americanos.

RELEASED MARCH 2014

Yew Nork

Poems by Dale Jensen

$15.95

ISBN 978-0-9913870-3-8

6 x 9", perfect-bound paperback, with full color cover and black & white interior.

Book cover and interior design by Margaret Copeland, terragrafix.com

Cover art by Paul Balmer of New York.

Photograph of Dale Jensen taken by Jannie M. Dresser.

Dale Jensen is one of the most exciting poets writing in America today. After years of publishing chapbooks and running several of the most popular reading venues in the San Francisco Bay Area, his attention turns to his favorite old haunts in Yew Nork.

Here, Rimbaud of The Illuminations meets Lou Reed in a Bowery bar, except Rimbaud has matured and Lou has taken a hope pill:

            noah’s ark landed in washington square park

            it landed there over and over again

            at least every five or ten years it landed

            but lots of times it rains and washes the old footprints away

            people forget about that even with coffee

            that’s why this place is so wonderful

     (from "Fast as a New York Sonnet")

Come to Jensen's work after a hot bath, double espresso, or stiff drink and bring a Zenlike openness of mind. You may have to let go of the left-brain's need for perfect syntax and logical order, but if you have tired of the kind of personal "epiphany" poems that overripen in America's lit journals -- or simply want to  "stop-making-sense," you will be greatly rewarded by a dive from the nearest skyscaper into Yew Nork.

this town i see in my dreams

is a town of penthouses and subway stations

steel and glass houses glowing by night

lightning you can sense with your eyes closed

(from "This Town That Glows")

Dale Jensen, born in Oakland, California, graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1971, and received a master’s degree in experimental psychology from the University of Toronto in 1973. He published and edited the experimental poetry magazine Malthus from 1986 through 1989 and has published five books and three chapbooks of poetry. He lives in Berkeley and is married to the poet Judy Wells.

Voices from the Field

Poems by Kimberly Satterfield

$15.95

120 pages, 6 x 9 paperback,

perfect-bound, full color cover and black and white interior art

ISBN 978-0-9919913870-4-5

Cover art by Foad Satterfield ("Fish Camp Diptych," acrylic on canvas)

Book cover and interior design by Airiel Mulvaney.

Released in February 2014

The great Persian poet Rumi inited us to meet him in the field beyond "ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing." Kimberly Satterfield creats such a place where readers can identify with those who suffer at the edge of a complex field. A social worker in one of America's largest, most diverse counties, Satterfield creates scene after scene of the isolated and claustrophobic world of those living in poverty:

Only after I get to know them

will they meet me without their teeth

because they don't hae

any: their dentures

don't fit anymore,

never did.

These are the lucky ones.

They make do.

     (from "Not Covered")

Voices from the Field looks over the shoulder of the poet as she faces her clients. The last two sections of the book -- more pesonal in theme -- articulate the resilient spirit to show us how sanity can be sustained while working within bureaucracies where social issues are masked by statistics or glossed over in terms like "entitlements" and the ever-present "bottom line." Here, compassion overrides frustration but never relieves the poet's need to bear witness -- not only the struggle to survive but to the deeply human need to comfort, communicate and connect:

If we unclench our fists

we can spin time

into an explosion

of blue light

. . .

Toss up your voice --

let it bend with my own

into a circle

of interlocking notes.

    (from "Revolution")

Kimberly Satterfield lives in Northern California with her husband, Foad Sattterfield, her 92 year old father and two dogs. In addition to her social welfare work, she teaches yoga and creates rituals for life transitions through In the Spirit Ministries. She is a member of two poetry collectives: Green Heart and Fresh Ink; this is her second book.

RELEASED MARCH 2014

The Glass Ship

Poems by Judy Wells

$15.95

ISBN 978-0-9913870-2-1

7 x 8", perfect-bound paperback, with full color cover and black & white interior art.

Book cover and interior design by Margaret Copeland, terragrafix.com

Front cover art by Sian MacQueen, Argyll, Scotland: "Waiting to Sail: Garvellachs."

Back cover photo of Judy Wells, taken by Diane Rusnak, standing before the photographer's painting entitled "Relaxed Swimmer."

Judy Wells spins out playful yet profound tales inspired by ancient Irish island-voyager myths in The Glass Ship. Although the characters you will meet here are not ordinarily associated with northern seas -- palaminos, flamingos, even Popeye and Olive Oyl -- their mischievous guidance and shape-shifting proclivities are steeped in the Celtic wisdom tradition that Wells inherited from her ancestors -- updated in a classic search for healing and reunion.

The White Archipelago

I'm surrounded by a white archipelago -- a hundred thousand white islands surrounded by a white sea. The islands are constantly breaking up, and on each one, invisible chalk-white people are losing their relatives to other islands. You can hear their shrieks when lovers are separated and parents are separated from their small white children. Sometimes you hear a sigh of relief when a mom loses her difficult teen, and the son cackles with glee, but he's soon calling from a distant island for a white bread sandwich with vegan mayonnaise. She's the only white mom among the hundred thousands who can make his sandwich just right. One day the white islands may grow green trees, but for now, all is white, a pure white universe.

"The Glass Ship by Berkeley poet Judy Wells is a creative work of a woman’s island journeys to satisfy her curiosity and sense of exploration. Lush language, imaginative shape-shifting make this volume a fun, worthwhile read.

-- Janell Moon, author of  Stirring the Waters: Writing to Find Your Spirit

"These tales seem familiar yet we find ourselves in unexplored territory time and again."

-- Jeanne Lupton, poet and literary host, Frank Bette Center for the Arts

"Every prosepoem in Judy Wells’ The Glass Ship is a note played on an Irish harp. Together they make up a music of childlike wonder and amazement: a Book of Spells. . .  What surprises are in store as this Irish Alice sinbads her way through Poetryland."

  -- Jack Foley, author of Visions & Affiliations: A California Literary Timeline

At My Table

Poems by Judith Yamamoto

$14.95

92 pages, 6 x 9 paperback, perfect-bound, full color cover

ISBN 978-0-9913870-1-4

Cover art by Larry Yamamoto.

Book cover and interior design by Margaret Copeland, terragrafix.com

Released in January 2014

The term "deep ecology" was coined to express our emotional and spiritual interrelationship with the planet and its delicate ecological systems. In a similar way, Judith Yamamoto's At My Table reflects a "deep domesticity" as she trains her eye within, on the household, and its connections to universal forces.

Yamamoto and her husband, Larry, a retired longshoreman and painter, built a house and spent years on the North Pacific Coast. For Yamamoto, raised on her father's stories about his Russian Jewish past and her mother's ancestral tales about North Dakota homesteaders, it as easy to find connections between genertions and simple survival:

The blizzard of 1897 piled snow over the haylot

up to the peak of the barn. When Father's woodpile ran out,

he sawed up the hay rack

and burned it.

Under the blankets we listened to trains

whistling over the frozen pastures,

memorizing the grain elevators.

(from "Reckon the Nights Remaining")

At My Table sweeps in the poet's global concerns about war, violence, dislocation, and how we respond to historical atrocity:

In every pebble, history flames up like bullets.

Down an exploding road, a little girl runs

on fire. Dry stones pile up . . .

We will spread bed sheets over the beds,

our hands moving slowly. Oblivion lies deep there,

not just in sleep, but in the smoothin out.

(from "From Smoothness Comes Oblivion")

The view, whether it be from the kitchen table, a wild hillside, or a distant desert village, is one that transcends time and space. It is often not a pretty one. The poet speaks from a woman's heart about women and men, women and children, women in lonely houses and women all over the world who seem to gather around her table like hungry ghosts just waiting for Yamamato to write their stories down.

"Over the past half-century Judih Yamamoto has been writing highly original poems, only a few of which have found their way into print. This collection should remedy that neglect." -- Richard Moore, poet, author of Writing the Silences