Sheryl St. Germain

The new and selected collection of poet Sheryl St. Germain.

New and Selected Poems

Let it be a Dark Roux

Michael P. Murphy

Jim Daniels

Orlando Ricardo Menes

Philip Metres

Maryann Corbett

Pat Brisson

Joshua Hren

Kim Bridgford

Daye Phillippo

Mike Aquilina

Kathleen Marks

Susan Signe Morrison

Stephen Gibson

Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner

Susan L. Miller

Barbara Crooker

Paul Willis

Dean Kostos

Pablo Medina

Gail White

Maria Mazziotti Gillan

Lynn Domina

Jeremiah Webster

Ned Balbo

Richard Cole

Jerry Harp

George Klawitter

C. X. Dillhunt

Julie L. Moore

Debra Bruce

James Matthew Wilson

D. S. Martin

Maryanne Hannan

Leonard Kress

Margaret Rozga

Joseph Bathanti

Richard Spilman

Tyler Farrell

Sharif Elmusa

Chelsea Martinez-Casiano

P. S. Dean

Alan Berecka

Tim Bete

Kathleen Bradley

Mary Buchinger

Roxana L. Cazan

Yuan Changming

Erica Charis-Molling

Joanna Currey

Jessica G. de Koninck

Dominic Gideon

Ed Granger

Lois Marie Harrod

Anne M. Higgins

Thomas Holahan

Siham Karami

Elaine Kehoe

Michael Angel Martin

Rhonda Miska

Robin Amelia Morris

Elizabeth Murawski

Stella Nesanovich

Matthew C. Nickel

Barry Peters

Mia Pohlman

Christopher Poore

Dennis Rhodes

Michael D. Riley

Lisa Toth Salinas

Nicholas Samaras

Janna Schledorn

Rita A. Simmonds

Sofia M. Starnes

Sophia Stid

Carole Stone

Maxine Susman

Maria Terrone

Brian Volck

Mark C. Watney

R. Bratten Weiss

Aleisa Zoecklin

Cydnee Devereaux

Jake Oresick

Mary Ladany

Juditha Dowd

Shanna Powlus Wheeler

Mia Schilling Grogan

New poems, translations, interviews, and book reviews in a yearly literary journal for Catholic Poetry.

: a Journal of Catholic Poetry

Presence

Margaret Whitford

St. Germain and Whitford's collaborative anthology expertly portrays the contemporary essay's vast possibilities in the range of lyric to narrative, giving any writer a firm grounding in both the craft and form of contemporary essays.

Essays for the Twenty-first Century

Between Song and Story

In this collection of poetry the author finds, in the character of Scheherazade, a metaphor for what it means to write. The voices of these poems are deeply female, whether they be those of daughters, lovers or mothers; they remind us that the difficult truths of the imagination are rooted in the body. Here are poems that find love and redemption in darkness, intelligence and emotion in the erotic.

Poems

The Journals of Scheherazade

Sarah Shotland

Writing programs in prisons and rehabilitation centers have proven time and again to be transformative and empowering for people in need. Halfway houses, hospitals, and shelters are all fertile ground for healing through the imagination and can often mean the difference for inmates and patients between just simply surviving and truly thriving. It is in these settings that teachers and their students need reading that nourishes the soul and challenges the spirit. Words without Walls is a collection of more than seventy-five poems, essays, stories, and scripts by contemporary writers that provide models for successful writing, offering voices and styles that will inspire students in alternative spaces on their own creative exploration. Created by the founders of the award-winning program of the same name based at Chatham University, the anthology strives to challenge readers to reach beyond their own circumstances and begin to write from the heart. Each selection expresses immediacy--writing that captures the imagination and conveys intimacy on the page--revealing the power of words to cut to the quick and unfold the truth. Many of the pieces are brief, allowing for reading and discussion in the classroom, and provide a wide range of content and genre, touching on themes common to communities in need: addiction and alcoholism, family, love and sex, pain and hope, prison, recovery, and violence. Included is work by writers dealing with shared issues, such as Dorothy Alison and Jesmyn Ward, who write about families for whom struggle is a way of life; or Natalie Kenvin and Toi Derricotte, whose pieces reveal violence against women. Also included are writings by those who have spent time in prison themselves, such as Jimmy Santiago Baca, Dwayne Betts, Ken Lamberton, and Etheridge Knight. Eric Boyd ennobles the day he was released from jail. Stephon Hayes reflects on what he sees from his prison window. Terra Lynn evokes the experience of being put in solitary confinement. Because in 2011 almost half of all prisoners in federal facilities were in for drug-related offenses, there are pieces by James Brown, Nick Flynn, and Ann Marlowe, who explore their own addiction and alcoholism, and by Natalie Diaz, Scott Russell Sanders, and Christine Stroud, who write of crippling drug abuse by family and friends. These powerful excerpts act as models for beginning writers and offer a vehicle to examine their own painful experiences. Words without Walls demonstrates the power of language to connect people; to reflect on the past and reimagine the future; to confront complicated truths; and to gain solace from pain and regret. For students in alternative spaces, these writings, together with their own expressions, reveal the same intense desire to write and share one’s writing, found in the Russian poet Irina Ratushinskaya, who scratched her poems on bars of soap in a Gulag shower, or the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, who smuggled bits of poetry out of jail in the clothing of visiting friends. Wole Soyinka, in solitary confinement forty years ago, wrote that “creation is admission of great loneliness.” In these communal spaces, our loneliness is lessened, our vulnerability exposed, and our honesty tested, and through these revelatory writings students receive the necessary encouragement to share the whispering corners of their minds.

Writers on Addiction, Violence, and Incarceration

Words without Walls

These poems celebrate and consecrate the physical world, moving from exotic to familiar locations, from the jungles of Ecuador and Mayan ruins in Central America to the rural lands and flooding creeks of Texas.

How Heavy the Breath of God

Sheryl St. Germain

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