Poetry Of The American Southwest

The second in a series on Poetry of the American Southwest, Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems is a collection of poems in the voices of those who inhabit the Southwest-from earliest times to the present, making this collection a fascinating history of the Southwest as seen through the eyes of its inhabitants over the centuries.

This is what Ekphrastic Poetry is supposed to do: go beyond the visual image of the photo and make the scene come alive in language. Once again, I find in Bleak Music this balance of sound, rhythm, lineation, and stanzaic construction that defines good poetry. - Nelson Sager, Ph.D. Piper Professor Award Winner Professor Emeritus of English, Sul Ross State University

Poetry. Foreword by Penny Harter. LIFTING THE SKY is the first in a new series from Dos Gatos Press: Poetry of the American Southwest. A perfect marriage of form--haiku--and subject--the limitless inspirations of the American Southwest--LIFTING THE SKY is essential reading for haiku and poetry lovers everywhere. With thirty-three stunning haiga, this collection is also a treat for the eye. Penny Harter, co-author of The Haiku Handbook (25th Anniversary Edition, 2010), contributed the foreword. Here, Harter says, we enter haiku and haiga that take us through the beauties of the landscape--from desert and mountains to the sea; poems that express the poets' political, spiritual, mythical, cultural, and deeply personal connections to the Southwest; poems that make us laugh or cry; and poems drenched in light that repeatedly carry us from the Earth into the stars and galaxies. As does the landscape, these poems lift us out of ourselves.

Weaving the Terrain is the third collection in "Poetry of the American Southwest," a unique series from Dos Gatos Press. Each poem is exactly one hundred words long-no more, no less. Subject and form are as varied as the landscape, the history, the people they evoke-stunning poems in every shape possible, including prose poems and haibun.

Follow the poet into landscapes of the heart, red and rich with the mysteries of high-desert beauty: "...cliff and canyon, raven, river, quail and coyote, savannah grass and deer...." In this collection of poems, Karen Austen captures the color and the power of the American Southwest, then takes the reader coastward into California, up through Washington state, and finally into islands off the west coast of Canada. She renders the sights, scents and sounds of seasons in their ever-unfolding panorama of change-the flora and fauna that surround her-all with an inspirational and loving eye.... These poems are pictorial, sonorous, sensuous, sometimes humorful or even magical, and crafted carefully-yet with an immediacy of delight and devotion that moves us to reflect deeply on the magnitude of our earth's enduring power and beauty.

One hundred fifty poems by seventy-five poets offer an inclusive collage of voices--protest poems of the Chicano farmworkers' movement, campfire cowboy songs, sacred Native American songs, and works by Willa Cather, Langston Hughes, Adrienne Rich, and other canonical figures--from a land where cultural collision is part of the rugged landscape.