. By g emil reutter . Carl Kaucher continues his evolution as a poet in his latest collection Ugh. The poet sets the tone for this collection in the first stanza of the opening poem, Café Waldorf: . A flame perfectly formed on the wick/ is the definition of a candle. / Aspects if gray adorn the dying sky/ like wisps of cigarette smoke dissipate into an afterthought. / A pool of soft orange light seeps through the kitchen window/ onto a snow filled yard/ bounded by a chain link fence/ glowing under a crescent moon/ as the tip of Orion/ stabs shimmering towards  ..read more

By Greg Bem I was flattened by disaster but upheld by the belief of my community. From “Rising from the Ashes,” the preface by Felicia Rice (pg. xvii) The Heavy Lifting Companion is a book of our climate. It is a book of our ecology. It is a book of disasters. It is a book that answers the question: what is next when what was is lost? This remarkable book is a companion to an art book that was born out of the loss of a physical printing press following a wildfire. It addresses what was, what can be, and what is across multiple frames, and does so by combining truth through storytelling with t ..read more

. By Charles Rammelkamp As the poet Robert Cooperman has noted, Alan Catlin is the Charles Bukowski of our generation. Like Bukowski, Catlin’s subject is the ordinary lives of the anonymous poor, alcohol and substance addiction, relationships gone wrong and urban sleaze in general. Like Bukowski, too, Catlin is an extremely prolific poet, his work all over the samizdat press. His current work,  Another Saturday Night in Jukebox Hell, is in keeping with these overall themes. . Catlin had a long career in the restaurant business in Schenectady, New York. For short, call him a bartend ..read more

. By John Zheng . Anne Myles’s Late Epistle opens with a poem titled “Bane,” which functions like a prologue that sets the tone and prepares the reader for what the poet says in this collection. The poem starts with the speaker’s plain statement that a subtle pain which is something unknown since her girlhood has been “pushing against my heart and breath.” Because it’s unknown, it provides a space for the speaker’s imagination: “a rock whose weight” slings against her ribs to cause dense cold, “a sleek canister / of poison gas” which writhes in her body, a fetus turning out to ..read more

. By Lynette G. Esposito . If you want to read a book with love on each page, Pillow Thoughts by Courtney Peppernell published by Andrews McMeel Publishing is the one.  The two hundred and fifty-six volume is filled with unsentimental verse expressed in almost statement like single stanza poems that are clear and direct. . The book is divided into ten sections starting with If you are dreaming of someone from page one to twenty-two. On page seven, Peppernell writes in a one-stanza poem: . We should kiss. Not because you passed my way by chance But because you st ..read more

I am pleased to announce the third release from Carbonation Press: Paul E. Nelson’s Daysong Miracle (Past 62). This small book is available now in Spokane, Seattle, and via Lulu. It has been an honor and a privilege to work with Paul E. Nelson and Roberta Hoffman on this release. This is the third of four “DaySongs” Seattle poet Paul E. Nelson has completed. The ritual was designed for workshop participants in online Zoom courses he has been conducting since the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown. They’re currently run under the names “Poetics as Cosmology” and “Life as Rehearsal for the Po ..read more

North of Oxford is open for submissions of poetry, book reviews and essays.  Please feel free to send for consideration of publication. Follow the guidelines on our about page: https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/about ..read more

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Barges on the Seine Pierre-Auguste Renoir, c. 1869 . The barges line up like ants carrying sugar, hardly noticeable on the broad span of river, the swathe of sky roiling above in white clouds, and the hedges brooding in foreground left. . The miniscule protagonists are practically nil, forgotten, a mere footnote to the wind, water and shadows that ignore them as they creep downriver on their plodding journey carrying who knows what to who knows where. . Their black forms dribble upstream, merely an inky line, specks of dark life on a canvas of dense blue, white, and verdure, just doing thei ..read more

Still-Life With Dragonfly Perched on Beer Bottle . And here is a bridge, not unlike a thousand other bridges made of rusted iron and sun-cracked wood, . a bridge that crosses a creek, not unlike a thousand other creeks that wind and weave their way through the raw fabric of the gothic, Midwestern American landscape, . where a lone Blue Heron, maybe, stands patiently contemplating a single gold koi (lazily circling a pink lotus blossom that is just now beginning to open). . And here is an abandoned barn, not unlike a thousand other barns in varying stages of disrepair and un-making, leaning pr ..read more