Poetose

01/06/2025

Lovestruck Books and Cafe is Cambridge's first romance bookstore, and it's gorgeous! They'll be having an all-day opening celebration on Friday, January 17 at 10 am to 5 pm. Check it out!

12/17/2024

"It Takes Work" by Ivars Balkits 🌱:
https://www.poetose.com/pub/it-takes-work-ivars-balkits

Paradise takes work. The vegetables must be watered. The scraped-up tall grasses burned or composted. Briars must be cut out. A location must be agreed on. So spread the ashes, rake them in the furrows. Reseed, pick up any stray plastic. It takes care. Still, take time to watch a little striped bird that has landed in the olive tree. Flick the cicada off your shoulder. Energy goes from the heart and mind into the garden. Walk around seeing, making changes. Paradise demands your attention. Follow the path of all fluttering and darting creatures. Identify plants, or promise to identify plants at a later date. Free the grapes from the blackberry brambles. Pile up the shards, pile up the broken roof tiles. Think about it all very softly. Let the day dream you. Imagine a near future of ripened pomegranates and purple figs. Ease into contentment, unplanned. It’s imperative. Necessary. Work at it.

A dual-citizen of Latvia and the USA since 2016, Ivars Balkits lives part of the year in Ohio but mostly in a small mountain village in Crete, Greece. His poems and prose have been most recently published by Vernacular Journal, Meetinghouse Magazine, Mercurius Magazine, Pnyx, Punt Volat, Otoliths, Sulφur Surrealist Jungle, and Seneca Review.

12/04/2024

We are happy to have nominated these wonderful poems for the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Check them out on our website at poetose.com/nominations! 📝📫💌 (Have no fear we have included both typed and handwritten versions when applicable!)

The Pushcart Prize

11/30/2024

"Pomegranate Seeds" by Lo Riddell: https://www.poetose.com/pub/pomegranate-seeds #/

When I enter the kitchen
on Wednesdays, I find them
there, at the counter,
carefully picking out pomegranate

seeds and dropping them
into a bowl of water
to be baptized or maybe sanitized –
either way, there’s a cleansing.

This is the way they always
do it, so delicate, like playing
with fruit some game
of they love me, they love me not.

I watch from the doorway
with hands at my side
as they keep theirs busy, plucking
in ones and sometimes threes,

like creating some harmony I feel
I should know by now.
The bowl of water is a pool –
no – a scrying tool,

which they use to practice
their own form of divination
where all of the answers
come up blushing.

They drain the water
and displace the seeds
from the bowl to a cup
that they hold out to me

like an offering dish.
I crush the seeds between my lips
and the answer spills out like juice:
They love me, they love me, they love me.

***

Lo Riddell is a le***an writer from southern Ohio, currently based in New England. She received her BFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University in 2022, and now spends her free time writing poetry, prose, zines, and essays on pop culture. You can find her, along with her collection of vintage clothing, on Instagram at , or at her writing website, loriddell.com.

10/26/2024

“child asks why did you” & “Trees & Stars Before Dawn” by Kelly DuMar: https://www.poetose.com/pub/child-asks-why-did-you-kelly-dumar

Kelly DuMar is a poet, playwright and workshop facilitator from Boston. She’s author of four poetry collections, including jinx and heavenly calling, published by Lily Poetry Review Books in March 2023. Her poems are published in Bellevue Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Thrush and more. Her images have been featured on the cover of Josephine Quarterly, About Place, Synkroniciti, Feral, Cool Beans Lit, Young Ravens Literary Review, Etymology, Confetti and Atlantic Northeast. Kelly produces the Featured Open Mic for the Journal of Expressive Writing. Her abstract photos celebrate the beauty and organic complexity of nature from the habitat of her home on the Charles River and her travels beyond.

10/12/2024

Book earrings in progress by Meia Geddes using gorgeous marbled paper by Cristina Hajosy 😍💜💕

10/09/2024

"Memories After Time" by CLS Sandoval: https://www.poetose.com/pub/memories-after-time-cls-sandoval

CLS Sandoval, PhD (she/her) is a Pushcart-nominated writer and communication professor with accolades in film, academia, and creative writing who speaks, signs, acts, publishes, sings, performs, writes, paints, teaches, and rarely relaxes. She’s presented at communication conferences, served as a poetry and flash editor, published 15 academic articles, two academic books, three full-length literary collections, three chapbooks, and both flash and poetry pieces in literary journals, recently including Op**te Magazine, The Journal of Radical Wonder, and A Moon of One’s Own. She is raising her daughter, son, and dog with her husband in Walnut, CA.

09/21/2024

Portraits by Dinora Justice: https://www.poetose.com/pub/portraits-by-dinora-justice

Dinora Justice is a Brazilian-American artist working in the Boston area. Dinora’s work explores contemporary ideas about nature and culture within the context of western art history. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, and a Bachelor in Fine Arts from The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. Her solo exhibition “The Lay of the Land” at the MFA Boston wrapped earlier this year, and she is currently exhibiting in New York at Marc Straus Gallery. She is represented in New England by Gallery NAGA. More about Dinora and her work can be found at www.dinorajustice.com

09/21/2024

"Rent the Moon" by Mathieu Ca***er: https://www.poetose.com/pub/rent-the-moon-mathieu-cailler

Mathieu Ca***er is the author of seven books: a novel, two short story collections, two volumes of poetry, and two children's titles. His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in over one hundred publications, including Wigleaf, the Saturday Evening Post, and the Los Angeles Times. He has received several prestigious awards, including a Pushcart Prize, a Short Story America Prize, and accolades from the Paris, Los Angeles, and New England Book Festivals. You can connect with him on social media or visit his website at mathieucailler.com.

09/15/2024

"After Chemotherapy" by Jean Trounstine: https://www.poetose.com/pub/after-chemotherapy-jean-trounstine

Jean Trounstine is an author, activist and professor who is the founder of the first Shakespeare Behind Bars program in the United States. She taught at Middlesex Community College in Massachusetts for more than 25 years where she was awarded honors for her teaching and work on justice issues. At Framingham Women’s Prison in Mass. for ten years she directed eight plays, and about that work, published the well-received SHAKESPEARE BEHIND BARS: THE POWER OF DRAMA IN A WOMEN'S PRISON. She wrote BOY WITH A KNIFE: A STORY OF MURDER, REMORSE, AND A PRISONER'S FIGHT FOR JUSTICE (2016) about why children should not be sentenced to adult prisons. Her work has been featured on National Public Radio, The Today Show, and internationally. ALMOST HOME FREE is her first book of poems, published by Pecan Grove Press in 2003. Her most recent book is MOTHERLOVE (2024), a book of short stories about the mothers of teens who have killed other teens was published by Concord Free Press. Find her at justicewithjean on Twitter/X and at www.jeantrounstine.com.

Poetose believes in language and the book as beautiful objects.

08/30/2024

"Back to Love" by Dana DeFranco: https://www.poetose.com/pub/back-to-love-dana-defranco

Dana DeFranco is a writer and educator in the San Francisco Bay Area. Originally from New Jersey, Dana was born in Paterson and grew up in Passaic County. Her work explores the ways in which our humanity is both fragmented and healed within the everyday. Dana’s poetry has been featured in many literary journals and magazines including The Ana and BarBar. Her chapbook, Blends and Bends, was published by Bottlecap Press. Dana holds an MFA in Creative Writing: Poetry from Mills College in Oakland. Her book of poetry, Place in Space, will be published in October 2024 by Spuyten Duyvil.

08/30/2024

Hello bookstores and gift shops! We have a new Faire Direct sign-up offer as of August 27: Using our direct link, you can get 50% off your first order (up to $150 max discount) plus free shipping with us for an entire year. Here's our direct link for the discount: faire.com/direct/poetose

Poetose publishes books, chapbooks, and broadsides of poetry, prose, and art across genres, and contribute to the literary landscape of Boston and beyond to make the world a more beautiful home for us all.

08/30/2024

08/29/2024

Thank you, Poetesss, from Poetose, for sharing your beautiful work! 💌💜💛

You can view "Psychedelic Heart" here: https://www.poetose.com/pub/psychedelic-heart-jojo-lazar

jojo Lazar is an artist-writer and art-enabler based in MetroWest Massachusetts. She is a collage poetry oracle, painter, musician, and teacher of creative writing and zine-making. She is the editor of the "Poetic Conversations" column at Anomalous Press's ANMLY blog on Medium. Her music as "Death and The Poetess" is available on Spotify & Bandcamp. All her links: linktr.ee/poetesss

Heart illustration by jojo Lazar, an artist, writer, and musician in Massachusetts.

08/21/2024

"To My Daughter" by Eden Absar: https://www.poetose.com/pub/to-my-daughter

Eden Absar is a graduate of the MA in Teaching Writing program from Johns Hopkins University. She is an aspiring teacher who aims to share the joy of storytelling with students developing their skills in writing. The primary muses of her writing are her mother, her husband Rafi, and her wonderful daughter Ruby Noor. Eden lives in Houston, Texas.

Read more at www.poetose.com ❤️

08/12/2024

08/09/2024

"The Man in the Yellow Beach Shop" by Jamie Reese Zimmerman: https://www.poetose.com/pub/the-man-in-the-yellow-beach-shop

Jamie Reese Zimmerman () has spent her adult life jumping back and forth from the East to the West Coast of the United States more times than she would like to admit. She has found love in four paws and has found resilience and patience while befriending the discomfort of dealing with a chronic illness over the past two years. She writes because she is convinced her fingers often know more than her brain does and yearns to be let in on their secret wisdom. Jamie has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Oregon State University, a Master of Science in Applied Gerontology, and a Bachelor of Science in Kinesiology. She often writes creative nonfiction and poetry for both her own heart and nonprofit organizations alike and serves her community as a yoga and meditation teacher.

07/31/2024

We are thrilled to publish our very first chapbook SKY by Australian writer George Genovese! 🌌⭐️🌝 https://www.poetose.com/store/p13/sky-chapbook-george-genovese.html

SKY is the account of a bygone age in which an array of long-forgotten zealots and seekers propound contending visions of the firmament characterized in terms of gemstones peculiar to their schools. For many among them, the Sky is suggestive of an unnerving intruder mysteriously withholding itself in their midst like a speechless stranger, spurring unease unless it is tamed by an ingenious, if unconscious, dialectics. For others it hints of limitless splendor, no less mysterious and overwhelming, yet which they welcome as the benign otherness ushered in upon them by the sky-bearing lovers in their presence. And so begin the exchanges between those of profound learning in search of what terrestrial metal, jewel, or gemstone best distils and fixes the essence of Sky and those of rawer sensibility who seek its true meaning with an instinctive ardor making up for their want in erudition. Much of the material here will be foreign to contemporary sensibility and likely to exude a quaintness that may well elicit an indulgent smirk from those of us belonging to an age – an enlightened age – that has long since consigned abstruse meditations and reveries such as these to oblivion. That may well be, but whilst we might laud ourselves on having transcended much of the unsophisticated mindset witnessed in these pages it nonetheless remains a truism that only by reacquainting ourselves with the past can we hope to understand the present, and, indeed, orient ourselves toward the future.

George Genovese has published five volumes of poetry, Time Steals Softer, The Essential Space of Play, Love Letters to the World, A Gloomorous Book in Verse and Mind Drift and one collection of short stories, The Bookworm and Other Stories, with Ginninderra Press.

Learn more at www.poetose.com! 💙