Small Press Poetry Publications

These poems offer an intimate look at the long journey of treatment, an unflinching search for hidden meaning in medical tests and operations, the equipment that houses some new form of data, those splintered sparks of hope. Yet despite the harshness of medical reality, these poems render butterflies on our sleeves, “fireflies in late twilight” artfully knit into the pattern here, yielding healing insight. Montgomery’s craft is equal to her story, evoking startling images in exquisite lines, which break into our psyches, our own “watchful waiting.”

— Carol Barrett, Ph.D., author of Calling in the Bones and Pansies

What a painfully beautiful book this is: poems tenaciously disciplined in form yet wrought from the sorrow of a sister’s loss to brain cancer. Breath Enough is the perfect title for this collection, for never does Teter get sentimental. She leaves us instead with just enough breath, just enough, with these poems that are in Yeats’ words, “cold and passionate as the dawn.”

— Bruce Guernsey, author of From Rain: Poems, 1970-2010

Time, deep time, is living in the resonant poems of Rick Benjamin. It’s amazing how legacies of family and habitation may be so neatly shaped and contained in lilting stanzas. Benjamin has a clear tongue for saying and a fine hold on mystery. After reading his poems, the world feels both more floating and more firm.

– naomi shihab nye

In these compelling and ambitious poems, Elizabeth Percer interrogates “the murky significance” of life: its genesis, tenuousness, and our hope for its very existence. As if arguing that life begins in the root of a word, Percer’s moving and miraculous poems echo with a curiosity both “tender” and “invasive,” and prove, by their primal and presumptive longing, that language itself can be umbilical: at once clinical and lyrical.

– Robin Ekiss

Wow! Lovely. Stark. Rich. Strange. I’d say these poems spy out the mind’s quickest turns and flights and falls. They are comprehensively alert in the present of their making, even as they range widely in subject matter.

– Li-young Lee

The artful compression in these fine poems enriches insight, magnifies detail, and allows for more spacious contemplation. Word by word, revelation after revelation, Rick Benjamin has given us a memorable collection of poems.

– Margaret Gibson