Books published by 1st World Publishing

Joyce's painting called "Bones of Zion" graces the cover of Mysterious Light. Her poems radiate beauty across the pages in "eddies of lemon and gold." "An aurora borealis shimmers" inside her past. A worldliness that began in childhood, living above a funeral parlor where "vacant mouths and cobwebbed hair," leapt from her imagination at night. Joyce enters into "a yellow flame of mystery," where the alchemy of her word paintings is so powerful as to actually absorb grief and transform it into a lush beauty. -Lynne Barnes, poet Delving beneath the surface of things, Joyce Uhlir's poems explore and shed light on a multi-dimensional world of nature where sight, sound, feelings, smell and taste mix - like paint on a pallet - to the delight of body and soul. Jasmine plays at the tip of my nose./ Cranberries splash round/ the playfulness of my tongue," she writes. The light in her poems can also thread its way into "the black fabric of night" as "Distant stones in a dark universe/ blink..." and as stars arrive "in the yawn of evening." Sensuous and spiritual at the same time, this light often seems like x-ray vision, making the opaque transparent and beautiful. Fortunately for us, she has shared her word paintings here, poems filled with "mysterious light."

The Yoga-Sütra is the classic textbook on the Transcendent.In his terse formulas Maharishi Patan¿jali describes the nature and mechanics of Transcendental Consciousness, the means to experience it as a living reality and the value of integrating it into daily life in the state of enlightenment.Vyäsa's commentary expounds the implications of the direct experience of the Transcendent as the silent field of all possibilities so as to live supreme fulfilment in life.

In this accomplished book, Mary Kay Rummel spins words into mysticism and magic. "Not to be ordinary," she was drawn into the convent where she was forbidden to read fiction because the Superior didn't like it. In "Patterns of Obedience," she writes that she was able to leave when "words whispered in that wind/telling her to go forth and read, to never ask again." Set free, she read and wrote and traveled, visiting early Irish history and myth. Throughout her book, bells chime in celebration as her words become exquisite lyric poems. -Jill Breckenridge, Poet, The Gravity of Flesh If you delight in plunging into an environment's sensual and emotional landscape; if you thrill to poetry that seduces and resonates; if you crave fresh language, intelligence, revelation and uncompromising risk, then What's Left Is The Singing-this miraculous confessional, this collection with its complexity of conflict and resolution, this sound-feast-will satisfy to the bone. Rummel's work allows us to feel how. . . light slips/through fingers into every fold of sky. -Ellen Reich, Poet, The Gynecic Papers When one reads the poems of Mary Kay Rummel, one expects a certain precision of language, a vigilant detail, a concentrated lyric whisper that elevates the ordinary life's ordinary aspirations. On these counts, What's Left Is The Singing does not disappoint. But these poems are also transformative. Here we find beauty that resists adoration, caution that armors raised fists, and belief that survives religion. Here we find metaphors for life's passion in the scapes of sand and tides and endless stars that shine through us. And if we don't find distraction from our ignorance, we do find elegant language touched with music and some blessings and a few reasons to go on. This is exactly what we ask from our poetry. -David Oliveira, Poet, A Little Travel Story; Editor, Mille Grazie Press

BENITA: prey for him is the true story of bright, vivacious Benita Kane and the Catholic priest who lured her from childhood into a disastrous, twenty-year entanglement that changed the course of her life. What happened to this fatherless girl in the hierarchical, patriarchal world of Dubuque, Iowa during the 40's, 50's and 60's is not simply one more tale of clerical sexual abuse, but rather an astounding, maddening, compelling account of what it was like to grow up in a family, community and culture so dominated by the Catholic church that no one could recognize the ominous events developing around them. As Benita's friend and classmate from second-grade through college, Virginia Tranel writes from the unique stance of both participant and observer.

"The Benson brothers have put together not only a fine book of poems well worth keeping close but also a strong testament of faith in those subtleties of blood that can elevate the ordinary into song." -Gary Gildner, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, Pushcart Prize, etc.; author of two novels, a collection of short stories, two memoirs, and nine books of poetry, including Cleaning a Rainbow, his most recent. "This is what poetry was meant to be, neither overly-sentimental nor veiled in obscure imagery. The poems read like music you have discovered as you search across the radio dial. Once found you stay tuned, turning the pages for more. This is adult poetry with risky passion, psychological pain, sensual thirst and the ache of longing. There are no forced inventions or over-clever literary devices. In fact, you are rarely aware of the writer, only the emotional landscape that unfolds with each line. The writing has a quality found in Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past - an old picket fence, the ruts in a lane. The sun doesn't merely shine on a meadow, but rather is "This July-fireball afternoon in a pasture . . ." When an alcoholic, frail father irritatedly boots an empty paint can towards his sons it becomes the tumbling, end-over-end kick-off of an imagined football game, the boys waiting underneath it to return the shiny offering. I find the value of any poem is increased or diminished in the sharing. The sharing of these poems, I can attest, stokes the delight and interest of another. "SCHOOLED LIVES: Poems by Two Brothers is a gift Barry and Steve Benson have placed in our hands." -John Gaps III, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, author of God Left Us Alone Here: A Book of War (poems and combat photographs). "Who says a book of poems need be the domain of a singular poet and aesthetic? With Schooled Lives by accomplished poets and brothers Steve and Barry Benson, you get double the perspectives, imagery and deft language about life in the unruly, rural Midwest and other climes. Here too, are lively pairings of poems that dialogue with each other. For instance, Steve's "Candy for the Fat Lady" begins, "She bulged in the bed of a parked pickup truck / where it cost two quarters to gawk at her thousand pounds..." counters Barry's "Wild Man of Borneo" - ". . .not far from fields / where we boys baled hay in country dust and sun and sweat, / patrons stare at the geek in rags and a promise..." Though both poets are natural storytellers, Steve -- a visual artist - leans toward a leaner, impressionistic verse compared to Barry's love of narrative. This weaving together of writers is a welcomed addition to the genre. As Steve claims, "The Best Writers are spiders; they connect everything / with fine homespun lines /. . . (and) live in the trembling / nets of their own designs." -Barbara Lau, author of The Long Surprise (winner of the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize) & the award-winning drama, Raising Medusa.No relation to me, but brothers in the guts of deep, dark, old, weird America, the viscera of heartland their shared family legends, firsthand feedback stirring one another's grief and energy along, resilient as cubs, memories crystals hard and sharp, these two linked different men are wrenchingly attentive to a restless, emphatic, and receptive, sensuous life in contact with and imagining the world they've known. Their poems' honest power braces against labor's compromises and intuition's leaps, tradition and discovery, to bring us into real places some of us have never been and others may not have left. -Maine language poet (eight books published) and practicing psychologist (not related to Barry or Steve Benson).

The wildness of the natural world, and of the spirit, just barely contained; the elemental and the ephemeral; a primal darkness full of stars; fistfuls of tart black fruit-this is the stuff out of which Paul Fisher makes his poems, poems that are mysterious and musical and often terrifyingly beautiful, carved out of the strange light of this world "into luck, luminosities, pearls." -Cecilia Woloch, author of CarpathiaWhen there is no wind, rain / tells vertical stories about the ground," writes Paul Fisher, and in taut poem after taut poem he translates those stories, moving vertically downward through "ghost-riddled strata" and upward beyond "Christ-old sequoia," then horizontally to understand "the calligraphy of mice and voles" and how, "peck by peck, our ragged / world is drawn." His "tempestuous marriage to poetry" offers more than the usual consolations-it provides celebratory reminders of habitation, intimacy, and "the raga, the renga, the unceasing prayer" that deepen our lives toward meaning. -Michael Waters, author of Darling VulgarityPaul Fisher's poems in Rumors of Shore are set with both deference and a gentle yearning in the center of the wonder, mystery and occasionally terrifying randomness and brutality of the natural world. He generously beckons to us, the readers, to join him in his experience of nature, his questions, his sweet hungers: "Like a dew-studded seedling / I wanted to wear the rings of wisdom / rippling the heart of a redwood tree." His is a soft, evocative, welcoming voice, resonant with a deep humility toward this world: "Sometimes I watch winter geese / veering back through dreams, / wild wings spread / like shadow-puppet hands, /. . .What use is it?. . . / no answer to my question / put to sun and moon and rain."Paul's thrifty, precise use of language, and in particular, metaphor, can astonish us with its unexpected, evocative images of the living world that expand its meaning, its importance, its essentialness: wishful skin, warm wine blooming, the moon rowing on, the pirated gimcracks of autumn, weeds riddling our walls with roots, as far as the wind can snake. This is a first book to be taken very seriously, and I am eager to read more. -Becky Sakarelliou, author of The Importance of Bone