— Sheila Bender, whose books include A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief and Writing Personal Poetry: Creating Poems from your Life Experience
“I’ve long admired the worldliness of Margaret Rozga’s poems, her ability to show us readers how what may not seem immediately to touch us can touch us immediately. And, while many wear what we call ‘social conscience’ proudly as a chosen garment now and then, it runs so much deeper in Margaret Rozga; it’s who she is.”
— J.D. Whitney, author of All My Relations and Grandmother Says
“The poems in Though I Haven’t Been to Baghdad throb with the anxiety of those left behind: mother, lover, friend. They are finely tuned to the fractures in daily life when a child is at war, when a child is wounded in war—how language itself stutters through fear and grief. As we mark ten years at war—wars most of us prefer to forget—Peggy Rozga’s striking poems tell us, Look. Here. This is the true cost of war. Here.”
— Sarah Browning, director of Split This Rock Poetry Festival, author of Whiskey in the Garden of Eden
“In one of the first poems in Margaret Rozga’s new collection, Though I Haven’t Been To Baghdad, her comparison of her son’s pronunciation of Iraq (Eye rack), a place he’s seen in combat, with her pronunciation (Ear rock), a place she can only imagine, rings true. Though questions of grammar won’t make the war go away, she employs the dependable rules of punctuation and tense she knows so well to parse the chaos that is her son’s world, where there are no easy answers. It is her diligent attempt to piece together what can’t be explained that gives her poems their authenticity.”
—Frances Richey, The Warrior: A Mother’s Story of a Son at War
us bear our lives, but it also links us to lives we never consider, lives that
have intertwined with our own and created shared yet distinct histories.
We press toward our next new beginning and use a shallow lens to
examine these stories. But they deserve closer investigation. Last June,
even as I was in the midst of writing about the past, it took me some
time to recognize the role of place and history as events unfolded in my
friends’ lives. All we are today is marked by the landscape, its history, and
the people we share it with, whether we’ve held their babies or not. The
fact that we rarely consider this doesn’t make it any less true.
That night, while I sat in the churchyard, cars passed through the
parking lot toward the back of the church. Our collective memories are
so short, I worried someone might accuse me of trespassing. However,
the SUVs and sedans kept moving. Perhaps their drivers hadn’t noticed
the dark figure beneath the hackberry. Probably they also hadn’t noticed
the stone “slave wall” that once denoted a plantation boundary and now
separates Calvary from Hillsboro Road, or the Confederate battle trench
near the church’s back door, as they rushed inside for their meetings.
I watched the steeple that night and felt the weight ease out of the
air around me. Again, I heard the steady drone of traffic on Hillsboro
Road, and it sounded like cars rather than a thousand untold stories
rushing past my ears. I could stand up, feel my head clear, and be happy.
I thought about catching up with my friends for dessert or some drinks.
I wrote these essays on visits. I slept in guest rooms, drove along
lengths of the Cumberland River that I hadn’t known before, jogged
through neighborhoods I’d always known about but never really experienced.
With the chapter of my life where Nashville is “home” so solidly
behind me, I found a cleaner divide between the present and the past. I
could hold it out like a globe, examine pieces of history from all angles,
think about place and memory and photographs and street names—hold
them to the light. In many ways, Nashville is the city I expected to find—
charming and friendly, but marked by deep divisions along lines of race
and class. Marked so deeply and completely that the lines themselves often
seem to have disappeared into the landscape. I was surprised myself at
how easy it was to cross the boundaries which had always seemed integral
to my mental map of the city. The windows were no longer catching light
on the horizon. I was actually stepping through them.
These essays are about the stuff we don’t really notice—roads,
churches, photographs, school buses, front yards, radio broadcasts, sports,
morning papers, swimming pools, classrooms, choir rehearsals, live music.
They are about the invisible pieces of life—my own, but they touch on
many stories. The meaning of our lives must be there in the everyday
world, lived out by both strangers and friends in the spaces we inhabit.
These essays record what I’ve seen, what I’ve come to understand, and
why I think it matters.
I hope this reads as praise, not for a perfect world, but for ours.
$4.99
Two Hundred Nights and One Day is brilliantly delivered by author Margaret (Peggy) Rozga. This book of poetry presents a brilliant analysis which takes us through the brave history of the strength, commitment and passion of the people of Milwaukee, Wisconsin as they marched, struggled and were jailed to win the victory of justice and freedom for all. Peggy Rozga joined protestors, participated in freedom marches, and was jailed for fighting and marching for the rights of poor Black children of the city of Milwaukee under the leadership of one of the great advocates of non-violence, direct action and civil disobedience of our times: Father James Edmund Groppi.
For my students, the turbulence of the sixties has reduced to songs and slogans, an occasional movie. The African-American quest for equality is pushed so far behind as to seem the product of a scriptwriter rather than an insistent force which guns and hoses will not stop. As Margaret Rozga says in her opening poem, History remembers the dream, forgets the nightmare. These poems speak of Milwaukee activists, including her, who marched for months to bring about fair housing. Each voice speaks with immediacy impossible to ignore. I have my memories of the sixties the meetings, the marches, the demonstrations Chicago, Washington, DC. These poems unearth Milwaukee s story, the story of so many cities in turmoil during that time. Thanks to the poet-as-witness, the reader knows that these stories will not disappear. --Professor Martha Vertreace-Doody, A National Endowment for the Arts FellowFor my students, the turbulence of the sixties has reduced to songs and slogans, an occasional movie. The African-American quest for equality is pushed so far behind as to seem the product of a scriptwriter rather than an insistent force which guns and hoses will not stop. As Margaret Rozga says in her opening poem, History remembers the dream, forgets the nightmare. These poems speak of Milwaukee activists, including her, who marched for months to bring about fair housing. Each voice speaks with immediacy impossible to ignore. I have my memories of the sixties the meetings, the marches, the demonstrations Chicago, Washington, DC. These poems unearth Milwaukee s story, the story of so many cities in turmoil during that time. Thanks to the poet-as-witness, the reader knows that these stories will not disappear. --Professor Martha Vertreace-Doody, A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow andThese poems bring to life an important, but often overlooked, chapter in civil rights history the fight for local and national open housing laws...This significant and accessible book provides an excellent way to introduce the study of the American Civil Rights Movement to students in literature and history classes. --Dr. Howard Fuller, Founder and Director, The Institute for the Transformation of Learning, Marquette University
For my students, the turbulence of the sixties has reduced to songs and slogans, an occasional movie. The African-American quest for equality is pushed so far behind as to seem the product of a scriptwriter rather than an insistent force which guns and hoses will not stop. As Margaret Rozga says in her opening poem, History remembers the dream, forgets the nightmare. These poems speak of Milwaukee activists, including her, who marched for months to bring about fair housing. Each voice speaks with immediacy impossible to ignore. I have my memories of the sixties the meetings, the marches, the demonstrations Chicago, Washington, DC. These poems unearth Milwaukee s story, the story of so many cities in turmoil during that time. Thanks to the poet-as-witness, the reader knows that these stories will not disappear. --Professor Martha Vertreace-Doody, A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and
These poems bring to life an important, but often overlooked, chapter in civil rights history the fight for local and national open housing laws...This significant and accessible book provides an excellent way to introduce the study of the American Civil Rights Movement to students in literature and history classes. --Dr. Howard Fuller, Founder and Director, The Institute for the Transformation of Learning, Marquette University
Real-World Strategies for Artists: Dr. Roccaforte offers tools for artists to maintain balance in a pragmatic world.
With her book Bridges in the Mind, Marianne Roccaforte has managed to deconstruct the How-To/Self-Help approach and offers us instead an artfully pragmatic, intelligent, and soulful guide for artists and artistic types. From her opening story of Angelina, who imagines that a book entitled “How to Act” will finally help her find her way in the world, to her 7 Strategies, Marianne weaves a narrative that is both straightforward and deeply empathic. She clearly understands the struggle that many of us face in balancing our imaginative sensitivities and gifts with the demands of our daily lives, work, and relationships. She offers us hope and good counsel as artists and as creative people who wish to remain true to our selves, true to our art, while feeling at home and making valuable contributions in the world.
—Daria Halprin, dancer, poet, author, therapist, teacher, and Founding Director of Tamalpa Institute, a training center for movement-based expressive arts therapy and education
Bridges in the Mind is a systematic approach to the fascinating and complex topic of the artist’s imagination as revealed in ordinary situations. Drawing on well-grounded psychological research and theory—and informed by years of direct experience counseling and teaching college-student artists—Dr. Roccaforte examines the realities, delights, and challenges of having a strong sense of wonder and an imagination that’s constantly “on.”
In a tone that both honors and guides the reader, the author weaves in voices of successful writers, visual artists, musicians, actors, and dancers, and offers easy-to-practice techniques for such situations as transitioning from an absorbing session of art-making, communicating effectively in social and business settings, managing intense sensory and emotional experience, and sustaining a healthy and active creative life.
Insightful and applicable for any person possessing an artistic sensibility—as well as for parents and teachers of young artists—this book enlightens, validates, and empowers, ultimately helping to build new bridges of understanding.
$4.99
Fellner’s humorous and touching memoir centers on his odd relationship with his mother, a woman who was once a championship trampolinist and is now a champion of the unpredictable. Who could blame her for demanding her son attend her high school reunion? Or suggesting the family team up to do some shoplifting?
Told with shocking humor and startling honestly, All Screwed Up manages to reinvent the coming-out story and describes one of the strangest mother-son relationships in recent memory.
With its many thematic riffs and harmonic phrasings, Lois Roma-Deeley's newest collection of poems, High Notes, invites the reader into the shadowy jazz scene of the late 1950’s, where music and language fuse into a road of longing and desire. Each of the main characters—hustler, jazz man, singer, waitress --and even the one hovering Angel who speaks to each of them--struggle with the tyranny of choice. This book won the Benu Press Samuel T. Coleridge Prize which honors an outstanding work of literature, written by a contemporary author, that fulfills Coleridge's vision of the artist as a reconciling architect of the imagination. Such a work invites us to examine our understanding of the world, establishing new meaning in a just future transformed by possibility.
Critics have called her poems "brilliant," "tough and brave," "poignant," “a vital chorus,” and "soul-satisfying." Roma-Deeley has won numerous awards and honors for her poetry, including awards for the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Competition and the Emily Dickinson Poetry Competition, and recognition as a finalist in the Paumanok International Poetry Contest. She has published in eight national anthologies, including forthcoming work in The American Voice in Poetry: the Legacy of Whitman, Williams, and Ginsberg as well as American Book Award winner Looking For Home and Letters to the World. In collaborations with visual artists Roma-Deeley’s poems have been exhibited nationally and internationally. High Notes forms the basis of a jazz opera she is writing with composer Christopher Scinto. In 2008, Roma-Deeley won the "Making a Difference for Women Award" from the Soroptimist International of Phoenix organization. Currently, she is Poet-in-Residence at Paradise Valley Community College in Phoenix, Arizona.
High Notes is her third collection of poems.