Sugartown Publishing

OUR CATALOGUE OF PUBLISHED TITLES

TRUCHAS: Closer to Heaven

Poems by Chantal Guillemin

Released January 2015

ISBN: 978-0-9913870-9-0

$15.95

6x9, 116 pages

Front cover art: weaving by Harry Cordova

Photograph of author by Lobsang Wangdu

Book cover and interior design: Margaret Copeland, Terragrafix

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.

Each summer, the family gathered in Truchas to refinish furniture, identify plants, prepare meals, visit friends, gather firewood, ride horses, watch sunsets and gaze out onto the beautiful Sangre de Cristo Mountains. They became close friends with many locals and came to know the sometimes stark, sometimes blurry stories about surviving in the Southwestern desert. Truchas was the place of young Guillemin’s first love, first brushes with danger, and first experiences as an anthropologist-in-training, working with the famous ethnographer Edward T. Hall to document oral histories of many of the older residents whose voices appear alongside hers in this unique book.

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.

Chantal Guillemin



It Lasts a Moment:

New & Collected Poems

By Fred Ostrander

$19.95 

216 pages, 6x9, paperback, perfect-bound,

full-color cover

ISBN 978-0-988200753

The cover art, "Pony Ride," is by Horst Gottschalk (1995), courtesy of Horst Gottschalk Estate. Author's photo taken by Jannie M. Dresser.

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

A first reading of It Lasts a Moment startles you with unusual and vibrant images:

And I will walk on the cliff in the wind like a ghost/

hearing in darker halls the deep lungs grudging/

names of ancestors in the gilt and the frames --/

where the mystic burns himself out on the wall,/

his beautiful teeth grinning in the candle.

 (from "The Blue Garage")

A second reading resonates with echoes within and between the poems, while subsequent readings transport you across a deeper emotional, almost mythical terrain:

And we cross a kind of dateline into newly risen continents,/

a new time. A time that lasts but does not pass:/

memory keeps all events but without number of sequence./

An enormous animal sculpted in prehistory,/

out of the sandstone, the head that of a man,/

weathered into the features of wind, of the traveler lost.

  (from "Can We Remain")

Such intimate yet universal poems were recorded at the intersection of time and experience, a place sometimes rooted in a specific locale, sometimes detached in the manner of some surrealist paintings.

Fred Ostrander lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is associated with the Activist poetry tradition created by Lawrence Hart and is an editor for Blue Unicorn. It Lasts a Moment is the culmination of sixty years of writing and publishing; it includes poems from Petroglyphs (2009) and The Hunchback & the Swan (1978), as well as over 90 new poems that were published by a number of prestigious literary journals including The Comstock Review, Nimrod International Review, iota (UK), Rattle, and Zone 3, or were not previously seen in print.

  Fred Ostrander

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.

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.

  Judy Wells

"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

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.

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.

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

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

Swimming the Sky

Poems by Gail Peterson

$15.95

88 pages, 6x9, paperback, perfect-bound, full-color cover

ISBN 978-0-9819945-8-1

Swimming the Sky surprises you with its frequent gifts of image, insight and revelation. The poems often hinge on humorous skepticism and a deep inner knowledge that is without pretension or cynicism. An amazing balancing act by a veteran of the San Francisco poetry scene.

Based in Berkeley, Gail Peterson, worked for many years in newspaper publishing. She founded a literary review of new children's books that kept teachers and librarians up-to-date.

Her poem "Serengeti Dawn" won grand prize winner at the 2012 annual Poets' Dinner.

Sharon Coleman, contributing editor of Poetry Flash, and an instructor of creative writing at Berkeley Adult School says:

"Each of these poems illuminates daily life like a secular prayer to the beauty, mystery, and sometimes sadness of living. In succinct, precise words, Peterson explores the network of being and her place in it. Hers is a voice of experience, curiosity, patience and wonder."

  Gail Peterson, author of Swimming the Sky

Falling Home

by Gary Turchin

$17.95

6x9, paperback, perfect-bound

ISBN 978-0-9646099-3-8

45-50 black & white photographs

Long-awaited, this volume of daring, warm, funny, practical, sensitive, evocative poems is a pleasure to read. Turchin's performances for children and adult audiences over many years have helped him hone these pieces to their sharpest edge.

Jeanne Lupton, who facilitates the Frank Bette Center for the Arts reading series in Alameda, California, says:

"Gary Turchin does not flinch. He lives with the hard questions. These sad and funny poems reflect rich awareness, deep humanity, and rare poetic power. I love Falling Home."



Workers' Compensation: 

Poems of Labor & the Working Life

By Jannie M. Dresser

$17.95

ISBN 978-0-988200-777

172 pages, 6 x 9, perfect-bound paperback

Full-color cover with black and white interior photographs

Cover photo by Michele Scotto, sequinedasphalt.com

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

Workers' Compensation: Poems of Labor & the Working Life pulls no punches. These are hard-hitting poems inspired by a life of "day jobs" from a refreshingly non-careerist poet. Jannie M. Dresser is a writer in the tradition of Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, and Philip Levine, with a touch of Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Parker, and Adrienne Rich thrown in for good measure.

If you are a worker, have worked, or are the progeny of hard-laboring ancestors, this book will speak to you about the downside of the American dream and its perpetual myth that working hard will allow you too "make it." It's about time contemporary poetry stepped down from its vapid postmodern tower and took the reality of living as one of the 98% in 21st century America. Dresser does this deftly, with a keen sense of pathos, a great deal of sensual detail, and a spark of refreshing humor.

   Jannie M. Dresser was raised in California's San Valley, daughter of hard-working builders, farmers and business people. She moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1979 to find a community of poets and writers, and to work in publishing.

Among the Shapes that Fold & Fly

Poems by Patricia Nelson



I have a simple eye.

It breaks things

with its premonitions.

$15.95

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

ISBN: 978-0-9819945-0-5

Cover art by Saundra Kiehn

Book cover design by Doug Williamson;

Interior book design by Margaret Copeland, terragrafix.com

This accomplished and strange book falls into a category of poetry books that have an extraordinary ability to balance the cool and elegant with the intensely passionate. Although the poems give a first impression of being cerebral and philosophical, a deeper reading reveals earthiness, warmth, light, sweetness and occasional whimsy.

The Eye Compelled

What is it prompts the journey,

the eye compelled

to revise objects toward the light,

to place the foot upon the clearest border?

The traveler, beginning,

in his uniform of small affections

applies to a horrific distance

his little, clicking heel.

He takes from the common tale

the red, extravagant detail,

a distinct song, a blooming tree

to cure a large and literal sky.

The traveler as ornate as a spindle

can only alter as he moves.

His song turns and calls

to stillness as he passes.

-

  Patricia Nelson is an attorney who works on environmental issues. She studied for many years with the "Activist" group of poets in California, led by Lawrence Hart and John Hart. In 2012, two of her poems were nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Doing Time with Nehru:
Life before the India-China Border War of 1962, events that led up to it, and life with my family at an internment camp.
A Memoir by Yin Marsh


$18.95

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

with black and white interior photoraphs
ISBN:  978-0-9786517-8-7

Cover art by the author

Order directly from the author at http://doingtimewithnehru.com

The midnight knock on the door and the disappearance of a loved one into the hands of authorities is a 20th-century horror story familiar to many destined to “live in interesting times.” Yet, some stories remain untold. Such is the account of the internment of ethnic Chinese who had settled for many years in northern India. When the China-Indian Border War of 1962 broke out, over 2,500 Chinese-Indians were rounded up, placed in local jails, then transported over a thousand miles away to the Deoli internment camp in the Rajasthan Desert.

Born in Calcutta in 1949, and raised in Darjeeling, Yin Marsh was only 13 when, first her father was arrested, and then Yin, her aged grandmother, and eight-year-old brother were all taken to the Darjeeling Jail, then sent to Deoli. Ironically, President Nehru of India, who authorized the mass arrests, had once “done time” in Deoli during India’s war for independence. Yin and her family were assigned to the same bungalow where Nehru had also been unjustly held.

Eventually released, Marsh emigrated to America with her mother, attended college, married and raised her own family, even as the emotional trauma remained buried. When her own college-age daughter began to ask questions -- and when a friend’s wedding would require a return to her homeland -- Marsh was finally ready to face what had happened to her family.

Yin Marsh received a Bachelor’s of Arts Degree in East Asian Studies with a minor in Mandarin Chinese from American University, Washington, D.C., in 1971. She taught Korean and Chinese post-doctorate visiting scholars at the University of California Berkeley and has worked as a visual artist. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband, a retired foreign service officer. They raised a son and daughter who also reside in California and continue the family globetrotting tradition.

To interview or more information, please feel free to contact the author directly at: Yin Marsh at [email protected].

  Yin Marsh with daughter Nikki at 2013 book launch reception.

A Stalwart Bends:

Poems and Reflections

by Ben Slomoff

Price $12.95

72 pages, 6 x 9, perfect-bound paperback

Full color cover and black and white interior images

ISBN: 978-0-9786517-6-3

Cover photo by John Chang McCurdy

Order at [email protected]

"I have often felt that I was born in the wrong era. My early life was affected by the Great Depression which left many scars; it was truly a Darwinian period of survival of the fittest. As the first generation born in the USA from immigrant parents, growing up was awkward in the sense that our household had a European flavor. What is currently called bonding, was out of the question. You were on your own from 13 years of age, you grew up in a hurry with minimum indulgences. I had a job at age 13 and have worked ever since. Education beyond high school was financially not possible and consequently I had to complete my formal education in my seventies and eighties. . . Yet, all along the way, my real pleasure has been writing and reading poetry."
                    -- Ben Slomoff, Rossmoor, Walnut Creek, California


BLURBS FROM APPRECIATIVE READERS

"To read the poetry of Ben Slomoff is to experience the warmth and enthusiasm with which he fills his poems. They are the result of experiences deeply felt and so well expressed. A writer of warmth and strength, a veteran of World War II, a life filled with travel, family, observations and more, distilled into this volume of poetry. This collection will be read with real pleasure."   -- Fred Ostrander, author of Petroglyphs

"I am happy to commend Ben Slomoff’s first book of poetry. Ben has a lifelong interest in poetry and has done intensive study of poems during the past two years. His pursuit of the poem has produced this volume and shall, I believer, merit future volumes. He is interested in a variety of forms and is endeavoring to be a good poet, one who is aware of the history of verse and the persons who create it. He is one of those persons."  
-- Jerry Ball, Poetry Professor, Acalones Adult Education Center

"In my years of reading and teaching poetry, I have rarely encountered someone as willing to dive into the revision process as Ben Slomoff. After tossing out nearly a third of the original batch of poems he showed to me, and suggesting that he focus on the more promising pieces, I joked that he had lots of time to write new poems. That was when I learned Ben had just turned 98! Yet, here is a writer absolutely committed to presenting his best work. This purity of intent and dedication to art should inspire any one trying to write. Ben is an inspiration and, as they say, the proof is in the pudding of A Stalwart Bends."
 -- Jannie Dresser, MFA, poet, editor, teacher

"Ben Slomoff knows his territory––the peaks and valleys of love, the broad and narrow roads of experience, features in a family's landscape. His poems are the meditations of a courageous and generous spirit, never easing into sentimentality, but confronting face-on the realities of living, with honor and humor. Ben simply puts us there, in his life––a life that bridges the 20th and 21st centuries. You can't come away from this book without a deep respect for his humanity." --Robert Eastwood, Poet

"My father, Ben Slomoff, born in 1913, has been writing poetry for more than 40 years. Throughout that time, he has worked in businesses and more recently as a mediator and arbitrator. (At the same time, he was attending poetry classes at Harvard and earning, in his eighties, a first and second university degree.) His poems cover a wide field of experience, closely observed relationships, and perceptive insights into life and living."-- Judith Loose, London

Between the Fault Lines:

Eight East Bay Poets,

Edited by Jannie M. Dresser

Poems by Marianne Betterly, Nalini Davison, Martha DeWitt, Jannie M. Dresser, Evie Groch, Judy Maher, Anita May and Carolyn Yale.

$16.95 ($20.94 total for book and shipping)

ISBN 978-0-9819945-2-9

138 pages, 6 x 9, perfect-bound paperback, full color cover and black and white interior photographs of each poet

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

Eight poets from the San Francisco Bay area worked together to hone their poetry over a two-year period, with the idea of putting forth a publication of their best work. Between the Fault Lines is the result of that effort. With voices distinctively reflecting a variety of issues--loss, pleasure, childhood, etc.--the poets have contributed another important volume from this creative region.