Sugartown Publishing

Works of literary merit

with something worth saying . . .

P.O. Box 128
Crockett, CA 94525
ph: 510-290-6254
janniedres@att.net

PUBLISHED TITLES

To order, please click on the drop down menu at left, "New and Recent," including books published since 2019 or "Back List" for older titles. This will allow you to order using PayPal. If you prefer, you can also order through Amazon, or by contacting the publisher janniedres@att.net directly.

Fox Woman

Poems by Dorothy Gilbert

ISBN 978-1-7340179-2-2

6x9, 94 pages, perfect-bound, paperback, full color cover

Cover design: Margaret Copeland, terragrafix.com

The world becomes magical and often mysterious in Dorothy Gilbert’s poems. Landscapes, cityscapes, ordinary domestic settings, and, above all, the presences of nature show forth in a fresh light. The language of the poems is vigorous and musical, its diction bracingly compact, and abounding in little revelatory surprises. This is a book that readers who care about poetry should cherish.

– Robert Alter, translator of the Hebrew Bible and author of The Art of Biblical Poetry

Known for her exceptional translations of medieval French poetry and as an instructor of medieval French and English literature at major universities, Dorothy Gilbert, of Richmond, California, now presents her first poetry collection.

Fox Woman is filled with the beauties of nature and encounters with the natural-wild, as well as philosophical meditations on mathematic formulas, art, and the mysteries of human relationships. The title poem was inspired by print artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s depiction of an ancient Japanese myth about a shape-shifting woman who transforms herself into a fox.

Gilbert’s poetry has appeared in numerous print and online journals including The New Yorker, The Nation, The Iowa Review, Tattoo Highway and Persimmon Tree. Her verse translations from Middle English and Old French have been included in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (3^rd ed., 2007). Her verse translation of Erec and Enide by Chrétien de Troyes (University of California Press), received a translation award from the Columbia University Translation Center. Her translations of Marie de France received Honorable Mention from the Modern Language Association and a translator’s award from the Northern California Book Reviewers Association.

After retiring from teaching at California State University East Bay and the University of California, Berkeley, Gilbert completed Fox Woman, containing poems written over several decades. Gilbert is also a dedicated environmental activist working with her community in the East Bay to preserve natural habitat against overreaching development.

Mi Tierra Adentro:

Poems of the Land of Enchantment

by Chantal Guillemin

$15.95

ISBN: 9781734017908

6"x9", 96 pages, perfect-bound

Cover design: Margaret Copeland, terragrafix.com

In her second volume of poems, storyteller Chantal Guillemin infuses life into more stories about New Mexico. She captures the essence of childhood summers spent in the Sangre de Cristo mountains, relations with neighbors, her battle with cancer, dealings with death and celebrations of life. Meet Charro, Truchas' woodcarver, garlic farmer Kierin, WWII survivor Lucienne, stroy-quilter Vivan, grieving jokester Nelson and other unforgettable characters who each occupy a panel in her retablo of lesser saints. Via vivid and sparse language, Guillemin chronicles a fascinating community, combining her background in anthropology with her sensitivity as a poet-painter.

Chantal Guillemin writes with the Fresh Ink poetry collective in Berkeley, California. This is her second book with Sugartown Publishing, following Truchas: Closer to Heaven (see below for more information on that title).

Dear Circus God

Poems by Judy Maher

$15.95

ISBN: 9781732406070

6"x9", 120 pages, perfect-bound

Cover design: Margaret Copeland, terragrafix.com

Losses are koans — “If the jewel is gone,

where is it?” or “Was it ever really yours?”

I turn out all my pockets.

No answers there.

Judy Maher is a quietly bold poet of rich imagination. In Dear Circus God, Maher faces head-on the random shocks and punishments that life seems to fling at us unsuspecting ones who sometimes turn to faith, sometimes turn to drink, and sometimes turn to poetry to manage our losses and sadness. Poetry is Maher’s vehicle for self-reflection, meditation, and observation. Poems are a way of affirming, “This is me, I am here, this is how I look at life, here’s what I’m learning.” Those who read her poems will say, “Yes, that’s it, that’s life, that’s how it goes.” These poems are vessels of both humor aimed at the absurd and compassion for those who suffer.

It is fitting the circus is the metaphoric backdrop for the earliest poems in the book: the circus with its thrills and chills, colors, daring-do and absurdities. Dear Circus God is divided into four sections, including the first bearing the same subtitle as the title of the book; following it are “Proof,” “Rapture,” and “So It Began,” with the book ending at new starting points.

Most pleasurable to read when life seems at odds with its inevitabilities and unpredictable tragedies (9/11, Sandy Hook, the death of a friend, of a friend’s son), Dear Circus God is also full of charms to accompany you through gentler days, to remind you that change is around the corner and to provide companionship on the surprising journey. The voice is strong enough to share its courage with the reader.

Judy Maher was born near Asheville, North Carolina. As a result of her father being a minister, she grew up in tiny towns in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, then moved on to Fayetteville, North Carolina, and Duluth. After graduating from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, she moved to San Diego, then the Bay Area, where she taught high school English, married, raised two children, and survived a second career as a real estate broker. Her husband’s career took her to three-year adventures in Saudi Arabia and Boston. She now lives in Oakland, California, with her husband.

Offering

Poems by

Hedy Straus

$12

ISBN 978-1-7324060-4-9

50 pages, 6"x9", perfect-bound paperback

Book cover & interior design: Margaret Copeland, terragrafix.com

Front cover art: Walter Straus, "Untitled," 1961

Hedy Straus was raised by an American Catholic mother and German Jewish father whose family was murdered in the Holocaust. Although she has written since childhood, this is Straus' first book, a no-holds-barred wranging with a painful inheritance and mixed identity that ultimately leads to poems of redemptive love, friendship, and community. There is genuine magnanimity of spirit in her poetry that can only come from someone who has done a lot of healing work.

Pat Schneider, author of Writing Alone & With Others, Oxford University Press, founder and director of Amherst Writers & Artists, suggest this work is "A profound offering, a book uniqe in its depth of exploration of the psychological trauma carried on into the lives of the grandchildren of Holocaust victims. Compassionate and deeply moving, the collection surprises and delights with the variety of poems."

For readers interested in Jewish identity, Judaica, Holocaust, Catholicism, mixed-ethnic identity, women's poetry, spirituality, poems of friendship and celebration.

The Smokehouse Boys:

And New Poems

Poems by Shaunna Oteka McCovey

$14.95

ISBN 978-1-7324060-9-4

6"x9", perfect-bound paperback

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

Based on original art by Louisa D. McCovey

Judy Maher is a quietly bold poet of rich imagination. In Dear Circus God, Maher faces head-on the random shocks and punishments that life seems to fling at us unsuspecting ones who sometimes turn to faith, sometimes turn to drink, and sometimes turn to poetry to manage our losses and sadness. Poetry is Maher’s vehicle for self-reflection, meditation, and observation: Poems are a way of affirming, “This is me, I am here, this is how I look at life, here’s what I’m learning.” Those who read her poems will say, “Yes, that’s it, that’s life, that’s how it goes.” These poems are vessels of both humor aimed at the absurd and compassion for those who suffer.

It is fitting the circus is the metaphoric backdrop for the earliest poems in the book: the circus with its thrills and chills, colors, daring-do and absurdities. Dear Circus God is divided into four sections, including the first bearing the same subtitle as the title of the book; following it are “Proof,” “Rapture,” and “So It Began,” with the book ending at new starting points.

Most pleasurable to read when life seems at odds with its inevitabilities and unpredictable tragedies (9/11, Sandy Hook, the death of a friend, of a friend’s son), Dear Circus God is also full of charms to accompany you through gentler days, to remind you that change is around the corner and to provide companionship on the surprising journey. The voice is strong enough to share its courage with the reader.

Shaunna Oteka McCovey (Yurok/Karuk) wrote her first poem at the age of six while growing up on the Yurok Indian reservation in Northern California. She holds master's degrees in social work and environmental law and a juris doctorate from Vermont Law School. She received a Distinguished Alumni Award from Humboldt State University in Arcata, California in 2010, and an Honorary Doctorate from marlboro College, Vermont, in May 2018.Her poems have appeared in News from Native California, Through the Eye of the Deer, The North Coast Journal, and The Dirt is Red Here.

The Smokehouse Boys is a republication of her first full-length originally published by Heyday Books in Berkeley, California, in 2005. This new edition includes all the original poems and severl new ones from McCovey.

Love begins upriver, at Katamin, the Karuk center of the world. Here creation was danced into existence; here "the might of a bulldozer does not equal the will of ten thousand years."

Shaunna Oteka McCovey is a river guide to these places, a cartographer of that which is created, lost, and regained. The old ways are at war -- with alcoholism, heroin, and poverty -- using ancient weapons, maidenhair, mussel shells, and beargrass. Anchored in the mountains and forests of northwestern California, yet at the same time transcending boundaries, The Smokehouse Boys is timeless poetry from timeless people.

Released October 2018

Dear Phebe:

The Dickinson Sisters Go West

by Judy Wells

Sugartown Publishing

ISBN 978-1-7324060-6-3 [corrected]

178 pages, poems & prose, 6x9, paperback, perfect-bound

$22.95 (+$3.99 shipping)

Cover and interior book design by Margaret Copeland, terragrafix.com

Printing by Minuteman Press of Berkeley, California

For Berkeley poet Judy Wells, a family story hinted that she might be related to the great American poet Emily Dickinson. She set out to learn something about her father’s Massachusetts’ Dickinson ancestors and discovered a treasure trove of family letters written back and forth across an expanding nation.

As poet Lucille Lang Day puts it: “ ‘Go West, young man,’ is the famous command, but many young women also heeded this advice. Among them were Judy Wells’ great-grandmother Phebe Marsh Dickinson and her two sisters, distant cousins of Emily Dickinson, who came to California from Massachusetts in the late 19th century. In Dear Phebe: The Dickinson Sisters Go West, Wells chronicles their stories in poetry and prose.”

Dear Phebe is neither traditional autobiography nor strict genealogy. In the hands of a poet as deft, humorous, and self-reflective as Judy Wells, letters and historical facts are turned into poems, and anecdotes become grist for the mill. As historian Lauren Coodley says: “This book is a wholly new form, fusing history and poetry, inspiring both disciplines.” And author Bridget Connelly comments: “I loved every twist and turn of this mind-tripping story and laughed with glee when the author ends up returning her great-grandmother Phebe's 100-year-overdue book to the San Francisco Public Library.”

Author Naomi Lowinsky describes Dear Phebe beautifully: “Wells talks to her ancestors, and her ancestors talk back to her in a compelling narrative, driven by the many surprising points of view she inhabits. Her poetic embroidery needle loops back and forth across the generations, warns her ancestors of their fates, brings them the terrible news of the 2016 election. Her needle loops across the continent between the three Dickinson sisters in California and their cousins in Massachusetts who are living wildly different lives in mid-19th century America. She even loops between this world and the next, and has it out with her 6th cousin twice removed, Emily Dickinson herself!”

JUDY WELLS is a fourth generation San Francisco Bay Area Californian. She received her B.A. in French from Stanford University and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley. She is the author of eleven previous poetry books, including her exploration of her maternal Irish roots in her trilogy, Everything Irish and Call Home (Scarlet Tanager Books) and The Glass Ship (Sugartown). She lives with her husband, avant-garde poet Dale Jensen, in Berkeley.

Released July, 2018

Family Matters

Yvonne Postelle

Sugartown Publishing

92 pages, Paperback, perfect-bound, 6x9

$16.00

ISBN: 978-1-7324060-0-1

Front and back cover design, and inteior design: Margaret Copeland, terragrafix.com

Family Matters is also available in hard cover for $26. plus $4.99 shipping/handling.

Contact publisher for delivery options: janniedres@att.net

Plum Jam

Winter-rich with summer’s flavors
and tart the way she knows I like it,
the last spoonful of my sister’s home-made
jam rests, a garn

et rosebud on my tongue.

I close my eyes and savor the lineage
that we issue from: complex women
stirring plum j

uice over wood-fed fires
as life unfurled before their knowing eyes.

Family Matters is Yvonne Postelle's third book of poetry. After Beauty won first prize from Poets and Writers as the "Best Self Published Book of Poetry" in 2012 and Sonnets for Sarah's Daughters was published in 1999. Born in Oklahoma, Postelle grew up in California's Central Valley and has lived most of her life in the San Francisco Bay Area where she is a

n active member of the Marin Poetry Center.

Released May 15, 2018

The Same River Twice

Lauren Coodley

Sugartown Publishing

130 pages, Paperback, perfect-bound, 6x9

$16.95

ISBN: 978-0-9987096-97

Front and back cover design, and inteior design: Margaret Copeland, terragrafix.com

Cover photo by Craig Philpott

Lauren Coodley's The Same River Twice honors the people and places that have shaped her life. This book is her first collection of poetry--a memoir in verse that begins with her earliest recollections and moves all the way into the present. Coodley, a retired community college instructor who pioneered some of the first women's studies courses in Northern California, is also an accomplished reporter about the Napa Valley region and California history. She has published several historical and photo-essay titles, including Napa Valley Chronicles and Napa: The Transformation of an American Town and is also the biographer of California's maverick politician and political writer Upton Sinclair.

"In the midst of great change and sudden disasters, as bulldozers ravage the orchards of Napa and old friends die, Lauren Coodley writes of the stubborn determination of ordinary women to lead lives of beauty and meaning in passionate, lyrical poems of mourning, courage, persistence, survival, and celebration." —Mary Mackey, poet and novelist, author of Sugar Zone

". . . I read a little at a time, savoring bright epiphanies. Lauren Coodley has a fine sense of rhythm and timing, but more importantly she has a sense of moments passing, flashbulbs of joy, of sorrow and of shame. She draws the reader into the work, letting them squeeze the grape of each line and savor the "sweet juice to wash the dirt down.”-- Kevin Fisher-Paulson, columnist, San Francisco Chronicle; author of A Song for Lost Angels

"Her compassion for people, acute powers of observation, and fine sensibility to the power of words and metaphor all contribute to this new collection. Her poems powerfully sculpt her life the way she once tried to sculpt her body with all its “hungers” (“Body Sculpture”) and reflect the wisdom she has gained through women mentors, friendships, solitude, and growing sense of mortality. Coodley’s collection sings: read it and enjoy!" —Judy Wells, poet, Everything Irish, Call Home, and The Glass Ship

Author and poet, Lauren Coodley

Released April 1, 2018

And Then They Were Gone: Teenagers of Peoples Temple from High School to Jonestown

Judy Bebelaar and Ron Cabral

Sugartown Publishing

315 pages, Paperback, perfect-bound, 6x9

$26.95

ISBN: 978-0-9987096-80

Front and back cover design: Jannie Dresser and Margaret Copeland

Interior book design by Margaret Copeland, terragrafix.com

Of the 918 Americans who died in the shocking murder-suicides of November 18, 1978, in the tiny South American country of Guyana, a third were under eighteen. More than half were in their twenties or younger. And Then They Were Gone: Teenagers of Peoples Temple from High School to Jonestown begins in San Francisco at the small school where Reverend Jim Jones enrolled the teens of his Peoples Temple church in 1976. Within a year, most had been sent to join Jones and other congregants in what Jones promised was a tropical paradise based on egalitarian values, but which turned out to be a deadly prison camp. Set against the turbulent backdrop of the late 1970s, And Then They Were Gone draws from interviews, books, and articles. Many of these powerful stories are told here for the first time.

"And Then They Were Gone provides fresh information about the teen members of Peoples Temple, filling a vast gap in our overall understanding of Jim Jones and his (mostly) doomed followers. I'm grateful to the authors for these insights." --Jeff Guinn, author of The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and People's Temple.

"A moving portrait of the high school students who lost their lives in Jonestown. Through documentation, personal memory, and in many cases, the teenagers’ own poetry, Bebelaar and Cabral show us the real young people behind the grim headlines."

--Autumn Stephens, author of the Wild Women book series

Judy Bebelaar, photo by Laurie Bell Bishop

Ron Cabral, photo by Rita Cabral

Judy Bebelaar was a founding teacher of Opportunity High School in San Francisco where she taught creative writing and English classes, Native American studies, and co-taught a cooking class. She was also one of the school’s counselors who interacted frequently with the kids from Peoples Temple. Judy is a prize-winning poet, author of The Widowers' Handbook, and coordinator of the Expressions Gallery reading series featuring teachers of writing, in Berkeley, California, where she also makes her home. Visit her website for more information about Bebelaar and her publications.

Ron Cabral is a retired school principal and teacher. He taught journalism at Opportunity High School in San Francisco and also ran a radio program with the students, and created and coached the school’s baseball team. His extensive research in the California Historical Society’s archives augmented the stories in the book. Cabral was inspired to create this book after viewing “The People’s Temple” at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Ron is married with three grown children and five grandsons. He lives in Contra Costa County.

Released December 2017

DUSK

Poems by Constance Rowell Mastores

Sugartown Publishing

122 pages, Paperback, perfect-bound, 6x9

$15.95

ISBN: 978-0-9987096-73

Front cover art: "Ice Storm, Maine" (1998), by Jamie Wyeth

Book Design by Margaret Copeland, terragrafix.com

Only a rare poet can deftly blend the elegiac with humor, wonder with rootedness. Bay Area poet Constance Rowell Mastores honed her skill through acute observation of people and nature, as well as by soaking in the diverse voices of the Modernist tradition. It didn’t hurt that she also studied with great poets Thom Gunn, N. Scott Momaday, Louis Simpson and Josephine Miles.

Her first book, A Deep but Dazzling Darkness, won the Blue Light Press Book Award in 2013. In Dusk, Mastores’ technical mastery is brought to bear on a wide range of topics. Whether describing a ferret amok in a nursing home, considering Ovid in exile, or capturing casual conversation after a funeral, Mastores’ unpretentious poems infuse the chill of absence with a uniquely warm presence that will move even the most cynical reader to awe.

At last we can understand the great and sad

machinery of spring. Why she must be beautiful

to embody all that has been lost. Why she

must make up for that heavy knowledge

with lilac blooms, flowering cherry.

(from “The Chronicles of Spring”)

Constance Rowell Mastores was born in San Francisco and grew up in Berkeley. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in French and a Master’s Degree in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. After completing her thesis on Wallace Stevens, directed by poet Josephine Miles, she left for Europe to study for a year each at the University of Florence and the Sorbonne. On her return to the United States, she taught in the Comparative Literature Department at UC Berkeley while working toward her Ph.D. Her work has been widely published and earned numerous awards. Her first book, A Deep but Dazzling Darkness, won the Blue Light Press Poetry Award and was published in 2013. Constance and her husband, Kent Nickolas Mastores, live in Oakland, California.

Released December 2017

Mi Tierra: America, Familia, Nicaragua, Amor

Poems by Juan Sequeira

Sugartown Publishing

134 pages, Paperback, perfect-bound, 6x9

$15.95

ISBN: 978-0-998709666

Book design by Margaret Copeland, terragrafix.com

Cover photos depict Granada, Nicaragua; mural in San Francisco's Mission District; and California foothills, photograph by David Silva.

The poems of Juan Sequeira bring to life the journey of an immigrant man who navigated many obstacles before achieving his dream. Abandoned by their father and reduced to poverty, Juan, his brother and sisters emigrated from Nicaragua in 1959. They settled in the Mission District in San Francisco with their mother. He attended public school but encountered counselors who discouraged him from attending college and, later, medical school, assuming that “Latinos don’t do well in academia.” A determined mother’s love, a strong educational base, along with study, focus, and resilience gave him the necessary foundation to succeed.

Sequeira, a graduate of the University of San Francisco Medical School, has been in private practice as a physician in Contra Costa County, California, for many years. Sequeira has won numerous poetry awards and is frequently a guest at one of the Bay Area’s poetry reading events. He is also a father of a teenage son, Juan Carlos, a budding poet.

Sequeira’s life is like that of many others who have not lost faith in the promise of America. In America, Familia, Nicaragua, Amor, he celebrates the sources of his pride. Along with poems of love for family and lushly beautiful descriptions of his Nicaraguan homeland, there are poems that describe the new immigrant experience and challenge all Americans to value our immigrant heritage.

America

We don’t need

your blessing

charity

Christian love

compassion

favor

forgiveness

generosity

hand out

kindness

mercy

pardon

permission

pity

prayer

protection

sympathy

only

your respect

Juan Sequeira’s poems are a glimpse into the heart of a man of two worlds, “a tropic seed carried by the wind to a northern latitude.” His lines are laced with a piercing longing for home — the elemental, elusive sense of place that spirit craves. I am an immigrant also. Juan's poems reached into a part of me that I keep secret and sacred, and left me raw. — Maria Rosales, author of Time to Fly

Mi Tierra is both profound and tender, a book of vividness that transcends both realism and surrealism. You don't just read about the lush warmth of Nicaragua or the cold heat of the Mission District, you feel them. The poems about his mother's death and his son's growing up are almost unbearably moving. There is wisdom and love, but also earthiness and hilarity. Mi Tierra teaches us that "the light star of love / is a bolt of lightning / that pierces the darkest night." — Dale Jensen, author of Amateur Mythology; Yew Nork; Auto-Bio, co-host of the Café Nefeli Reading Series, Berkeley

Juan Sequeira was born in Nicaragua. At the age of 7, he emigrated with his mother, brother and sisters to the United States, after the family was abandoned by their father. They settled in to San Francisco's Hispanic Mission District, and Juan attended local schools. With ambitions to attend medical school, Juan had to overcome prejudice that -- as one counselor told him -- "Latinos don't do well in academia." He graduated from the University of San Francisco Medical School and is a practicing physician in Contra Costa County. Juan published two previous poetry books: Marimba Dreams and Jaguar Footsteps. His son, Juan Carlos, now in high school, is also a budding poet.

Released September 2017

The Self-Evolution Spa

Poems by Bruce Bagnell

Sugartown Publishing

220 pages, Paperback, perfect-bound, 6x9

$24.95

ISBN: 978-0-9987096-59

Front cover: Untitled painting by William Bagnell

Reading this book, I had the feeling of being in the company of a wise and learned person who observes the political nature of experience and has the good sense to laugh. Bruce Bagnell’s twisted lines give us a view of our twisted world that cannot truly be understood straight up. Such incisive poetry is impossible to over-praise. — Adam David Miller, author of The Sky is a Page and Fall Rising

In this diverse, compelling poetry collection, Bruce Bagnell observes and reflects a great deal upon an urban landscape, often following the lead of the Beats in offering up the grit and grind, the edginess, the rhythm of walking neighborhood streets, the subtle and more jarring ironies of navigating a working-class environment, social issues and seasons of war and strife. Bagnell creates shifts in mood and flow seamlessly, with form (a balanced mix of long and short poems) and the multitude of experiences from childhood to adulthood that encompass a life(time). He has paid attention, and we readers are gifted with imagery and language that’s alive, alert, passionate, honest and courageous. — John Rowe, author of Winsome Losesome and Beyond Perspective,
President, Bay Area Poets Coalition

The Self-Evolution Spa is Bruce Bagnell’s haunting new collection of poems. His vivid descriptive language guides us through the underbelly of America — Oakland, New York, or Ohio — all decaying. With each astute word, he shines a light on the places where they still let you hide. Our eyes linger on the cardboard boxes huddled beneath the overpass in his asphalt forgotten world. Whether in Ohio or California he exposes the bitter hard core of America. And, over it all, the ever-present crows and raptors hover or scratch their way through the rubble. —Leila Rae, editor and publisher, Pandemonium Press

Bruce Bagnell has lived in the Bay Area since the Vietnam war where he served as a United States Air Force Captain. He has worked as a cook, mechanic, and college professor, and has held various management positions including running a car dealership. Although mostly retired now, Bagnell continues to work part-time as a management consultant and recently remodeled a 1930’s French Laundry into an art space, house, dance space, and Pilates studio.

Besides writing poetry he co-hosts a longtime reading series called Poetry Express in Berkeley, California. In addition to the credits for prior publication listed on a previous page, he has been published in Chaparral Magazine, Oxford Magazine, The Tower Journal, Crack the Spine, Juked, Poetalk, The Alembic, and several on-line journals.

Released February 2017

Amateur Mythology

Poems by Dale Jensen

Sugartown Publishing

Paperback, perfect-bound, 6x9

$16.95

ISBN: 978-0-9987096-04

Front cover: Paul Bransom, frontispiece from The Wind and the Willows (1913)

Back cover: Franz von Stuck, “Dissonance” (1910)

i’m always amazed at how our deities

act like adolescents

Give yourself a break and read Dale Jensen’s Amateur Mythology. Like the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes, Jensen shows how our narratives are constructed of wooden beams, porous walls, dishes in disarray, and distorted mirrors. Maybe all there is to fear is that there is nothing to fear . . . unless our thoughts themselves are terrifying? Amateur Mythology is a rare poetry fun-house created by a master of language using the marvelous tools of words, commas, and sentences.

"Amateur Mythology is part surrealist romp and part philosophical contemplation, with a measure of language poetry offered in the mix, often channeled through the mouth of a late-night comedian who tells us, 'I Laugh Therefore I Am.' Creating a contemporary mythology from Greek, Egyptian, and Scandinavian sources, artists and poets occasionally make cameo appearances as Jensen goes about the serious business of understanding our wounded world. He also ponders the inevitability of death and the permanence of love with the advice to, 'walk away holding it forever.'"
— Lenore Weiss, author of Last Tree on Easter Island

Interference

odysseus stares

at his cell phone

how can it

betray him like this?

the splat of the ocean

on the sides of his ship

must be interfering

with his reception

with all this interference

his reception going in and out

how can he understand

what the gods are saying?

Dale Jensen, a native of Oakland, California, and University of California Berkeley graduate, lives in Berkeley and is married to the poet Judy Wells. He has published seven poetry books and three chapbooks, including his most recent: Auto Bio and Yew Nork.

Released January 2017

Storm Camp

Poems by John Hart

Sugartown Publishing

Paperback, perfect-bound, 6x9

$17.95

ISBN #: 978-0-9970966-9-9

Design by Margaret Copeland, terragrafix.com
Cover photograph by Ed Webster: Ang Zangbu Sherpa on Mt. Everest,
West Ridge Direct, 1985.
Back cover sketch of John Hart by Geoff Bernstein.
Author photograph on page 111 by David Sanger.

From the Yale Review

"John Hart conflates the phenomenon of poetry, or perhaps revelation, with
the fiercely difficult sport of mountain-climbing, substituting Mount Rainier
and its peers for Parnassus.... Hart is a strange poet, temperamentally and
stylistically. The frequency of Christian allusion, the odd perceptions jolted
into dream-like dislocations call to mind Robert Lowell, not his Life Studies,
but the Lowell of the 1940s, surrealist and Catholic.... At the same time, Hart
is a poet capable of drawing the threads of his attention together into luminous
transactions with a visible and secular nature.... He shows more than amateur
skill in handling traditional meter and rhyme, surely the most daring approach
to poetic form nowadays. How many other new poets of the 1970s can write
convincing rhymed tetrameter couplets or poems in terza rima? This is clearly
an independent spirit, and to be encouraged."

John Hart of San Rafael is
the author of sixteen books
including two books of poetry.
Storm Camp takes its place
alongside The Climbers which
was chosen in 1978 for the Pitt
Poetry Series and supported
by a James D. Phelan Award.
Hart works privately with the poets known as the Activists in
the San Francisco Bay Area, pursuing a poetic tradition stretching
back to the 1930s. He also co-edits the durable all-poetry
journal Blue Unicorn, now completing its fourth decade. His own
periodical publication includes Interim, The New Formalist, Orbis,
Midwestern Quarterly, Seventh Quarry, and the Southern Poetry
Review, among others. Hart also wrote An Island in Time: 50 Years
of Point Reyes National Seashore and San Francisco’s Wilderness Next
Door. In his day job as an environmental journalist, Hart has garnered
sundry recognitions, notably two Medals in Californiana in
the Commonwealth Club Book Awards. And, he climbs.

Released February 2016

My Dad Believed in Love

Poems by Catherine Elizabeth Dana

Sugartown Publishing

Paperback, perfect-bound, 6x9

130 pages

$17.95

ISBN: 978-0-9970966-20

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

"Cathy Dana’s poems are lyrical and touching. A loving tribute to her father and to the pain of watching him slip away. The beauty of her words triumphs over the bleakness of the nursing home and the profound sadness of her loss." — Elliot Aronson, author of The Social Animal

"The poems and essays in My Dad Believed in Love, by Catherine Elizabeth Dana, constitute a moving tribute to the author’s father, Alfred Langdon Dana, who was known to his friends and family as Lang. The book, which covers the events of Lang’s life from childhood through old age, not only honors and celebrates Lang but also shows why Dana loved her father and how we can find our way through the labyrinth of grief." — Lucille Lang Day, author of Married at Fourteen and Becoming an Ancestor

Cathy Dana

Released November 2015

The Harsh Green World

Poems by Robert Coats

Sugartown Publishing

Paperback, perfect-bound, 6x9

130 pages

$16.95

ISBN: 978-0-9863346-8-9

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

Back cover photography by the author: "Lake Tahoe from Bliss State Park"

With a foreword by Daniel Marlin.

At the core of The Harsh Green World is that very "green" world of nature -- weather, mountains, wildlife, water, soil, rock. Unpredictable as it may be, in its droughts, storms, turbulent rivers, and inescapable heat, this world is the supportive base for one who can hold Earth close and dear -- with respect for its need for order and protection. The poems share a beautiful equanimity with nature through this remarkable poet's keen senses.

The Harsh Green World is also a study of relationships -- especially that territory between men: grandfather, father, sons, and friends. The reader is taken into a place epxressed in gestures, tools, and shared exploration more often than in words. Finally, there are poems that share disgust and horror at what people do in the name of politics o position but even here, the poet's tenderness often wins out over rage.

"Robert Coats has walked and worked in wildernesses for decades, and in this collection — of family narrative, ode to wilderness, and social protest — the restorative power of nature shines though. My favorite poems of his are about family and the natural world: even when mourning failing ecosystems and personal tragedy, he returns to the corrective order of landscape and the wild: in one poem, to “slide to a stop and sit up, at home in this world.” And after a set of poems on our collective inhumanity, he returns to nature again, inviting us, through a poet’s appreciative eye, to 'think of the night canyon, wind hissing through pines.'”
— Patti Trimble, poet and teacher

"This book is such a rich collection I read it cover to cover in one sitting and wished for more. His narratives are strong and sure, his endings poignant and memorable, and there are no missteps. I love his comfortable, lyrical use of language and the heart in every poem."
— Gail Entrekin, editor, Canary

Robert Coats

RELEASED JULY 13, 2015

Joyriding on an Updraft

Poems by Deborah Dashow Ruth

Sugartown Publishing

Paperback, perfect-bound, 6x9

148 pages

$16.95

ISBN: 978-0-9863346-5-8

Book and interior cover design by
Margaret Copeland, terragrafix.com
Cover photograph from www.swallowsnest.co.nz
Author photograph by Laura Lundy-Paine

$15.95

Joyriding on an Updraft chronicles a life in poetry spent very
much in the spirit of its title. Deborah Dashow Ruth has been
steadfastly paying attention, catching poems as they come in all
manner of guises, holding on for the ride, and expecting joy.
— Dan Bellm, Practice

Deborah Dashow Ruth, a long-time supporter of the poetry
and theatre communities in the Bay Area, reveals a voice both
playful and bemused in this retrospective collection. In the
title poem, “From the Bluff at Fort Worden,” fresh similes
delight: “clouds like giant grapes” and “swallows like a random
toss of jacks . . . that swoop and jink.” In my other favorite
poem, “Division of Labor,” the short blunt lines fit the clipped
and spare nature of the bleak conversation, or lack thereof,
between husband and wife. The poet revisits the moments of
her life with humor, nostalgia, and insight.
— Gail Entrekin, Rearrangement of the Invisible,
editor of Canary

Deborah Dashow Ruth’s first full-length book of poetry spans
fifty years of a life well-lived, and well written about. Her poems
show a mastery of styles, from free verse to villanelles, sonnets to
concrete poetry. Dashow Ruth’s poems show that a life does not
have to be fraught with trauma to be meaningful to the reader.
— Margo Solad, Some Very Soft Days

Joyriding on an Updraft leads you through musings, worries,
denials, and wonderment about mother, father, brothers,
husbands, strangers, famous poets, lovers, sex, cats, mock–
ingbirds, and the craft of poetry — weaving in tidbits of advice
(“Save your sad news until tomorrow”) and reminders of
mortality (“Memento Mori”) that will resonate long after . . .
— Marianne Betterly

Deborah Dashow Ruth

SUN ON THE RIND

Poems by Bonnie Thomas

Released June 2015

Sugartown Publishing

Paperback, perfect-bound, 114 pages

ISBN: 978-0-9863346-2-7

$15.95

Cover art, “Fruit and the Glass Plate” by Bonnie Thomas
Solid oil pastel, turpentine and linseed oil painted on paper
Book design and graphics by Bonnie Thomas
Preproduction coordination by Margaret Copeland

Berkeley poet Bonnie Thomas has long practiced the methods of the well-known Activist group of poets first inspired by Lawrence Hart and continued by his son, John Hart, of the Hart Institute in San Rafael. The techniques require intense observation and sensual reporting, foregoing the easy reliance on traditional metaphors. Thomas, who once organized a reading series at Open Secret Booktore in San Rafael, has been widely published in Blue Unicorn, several of the Marin Poetry Center anthologies, Soul Culture, the Parnassus Literary Review and has poems in Beside the Sleeping Maiden (from Arctos Press), Up Against the Wall, Mother, Rebirth of Artemis, and elsewhere.

Her work is deliciously sensual and atmospheric, using the conceit of the cycle of the year through both the vegetal and human worlds. In Sun on the Rind, there is a convergence of influences from Gerard Manly Hopkins to Wendell Berry, themes of spirit, body, and what it means to be a "living thing" in a world of lived things: animated, curious, provocatively acted upon and acting.

The Grand Invitation

This is winter’s middle ground, the long pursuit,
a calamity of many darknesses:
     the wide rainfall, a loosed leaf of sustenance
     the withdrawn chlorophyll
     the brief and concise dusk.

We work our photosynthesis as we can,
hours metered toward the zenith of the sun:
     the unsheltered, southerly window and street
     the midday reflections
     the quick breath and the hill.

No sign is seen, save the text of the faithful.
The contract, broken and the future, dormant.
The small uncertainties.

Still, all is in motion.
The node of the branch, insects in from the cold.
All life moves toward the source:
the sun, oxygen, the water and the blood
the body’s sealed and mystical alchemy.

One quiet emergence
as we come to our light, speak out our full name.
The invitation we must never decline.

Bonnie Thomas

STRONGER THAN I KNOW:

My Story in Poem

Inspirational Verse by Cheri Coleman

Released April 2015

ISBN 978-0-9863346-1-0

$14.95

6x9, 104 pages

Book cover & interior design by Margaret Copeland, Terragrafix

At age 49, Cheri Coleman found herself facing a cancer diagnosis and economic uncertainty and knew it was time to get out of her toxic marriage. Through a process of open-hearted self-examination, she achieved clarity aboout what she needed to do. The strength to confront the problems in her marriage -- and her own role in it -- eventually depended on building a deep and abiding faith that God had something better in store for her. Learning to trust and listen to that Guidance, Coleman found both acceptance and forgiveness and ultimately made the decision to move on.

Stronger than I Know: My Story in Poem speaks to anyone who has not yet secured the strength to leave a bad relationship and will support those who have moved on but are still plagued by self-doubt, resentment and anger. As Victoria Levine, author of Wolf in Sheep's Clothing writes: "It is a wonderful read of honesty that uuncovers the depth of who you are, what you want, what is healthy for you and how supported you really are in life."

Cheri Coleman

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

Online Obituary for Fred Ostrander

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sfgate/obituary.aspx?pid=178089249

Fred Ostrander whose book It Lasts a Moment: New & Collected Works was published by Sugartown in 2013. This was a compilation of Ostrander's best work from a long lifetime of writing and publishing. Ostrander was an editor of Blue Unicorn for many years and was a member of the Activist Poets group led originally by Lawrence Hart in San Francisco and then by Hart's son John Hart, whose book Storm Camp will come out from Sugartown later in 2016. Ostrander had been affected by a stroke a few years ago but died of a heart attack in March 2016.

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

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.

Fox Woman

Poems by Dorothy Gilbert

SUGARTOWN PUBLISHING

$15.95, 6x9, 94 pages, soft-cover, full color-cover

ISBN 978-1-7340179-2-2

Book and cover design by Margaret Copeland, terrgrafix.com

Cover art: The Fox-Woman Leaving Her Child by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi

Printed in Berkeley, California, at Minuteman Press

To order by check, cash or money order: use the form enclosed.

Poems by Dorothy Gilbert

SUGARTOWN PUBLISHING

$15.95, 6x9, 94 pages, soft-cover, full color-cover

ISBN 978-1-7340179-2-2

Book and cover design by Margaret Copeland, terrgrafix.com

Cover art: The Fox-Woman Leaving Her Child by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi

Printed in Berkeley, California, at Minuteman Press

To order by check, cash or money order: use the form enclosed.

Online at Amazon or Sugartown Publishing https://sugartownpublishing.com (Paypal)

Poems by Dorothy Gilbert

SUGARTOWN PUBLISHING

$15.95, 6x9, 94 pages, soft-cover, full color-cover

ISBN 978-1-7340179-2-2

Book and cover design by Margaret Copeland, terrgrafix.com

Cover art: The Fox-Woman Leaving Her Child by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi

Printed in Berkeley, California, at Minuteman Press

To order by check, cash or money order: use the form enclosed.

Online at Amazon or Sugartown Publishing https://sugartownpublishing.com (Paypal)

Poems by Dorothy Gilbert

SUGARTOWN PUBLISHING

$15.95, 6x9, 94 pages, soft-cover, full color-cover

ISBN 978-1-7340179-2-2

Book and cover design by Margaret Copeland, terrgrafix.com

Cover art: The Fox-Woman Leaving Her Child by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi

Printed in Berkeley, California, at Minuteman Press

To order by check, cash or money order: use the form enclosed.

$15.95, 6x9, 94 pages, soft-cover, full color-cover

6"x9", 96 pages, perfect-bound

Fox Womanis filled with the beauties of nature and encounters with the natural-wild, as well as philosophical meditations on mathematic formulas, art, and the mysteries of human relationships. The title poem was inspired by print artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s depiction of an ancient Japanese myth about a shape-shifting woman who transforms herself into a fox.