Mammoth Publishes Author Denise Lajimodiere's Poetry about Boarding School Experiences

BITTER TEARS, 36 pp., poetry, staplebound, $12.00 ISBN 978-1-939301-72-7  

Online orders $2 off. PayPal Click Here or email mammothpubs@gmail.com for multiple copies or information. International orders, add postage amount.

Denise Lajimodiere spent years interviewing boarding school survivors for this  poetry project of moving verse, Bitter Tears. The poems describe the experiences of children who experienced the wrenching trauma of assimilationist boarding schools. Denise Lajimodiere, an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is past President of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (N-NABS-HC) and present board member. Denise works as an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at North Dakota State University, Fargo. Her current research agenda includes the history of American Indian boarding schools and also Native female leadership and Horizontal Violence. Her first book of poems is Dragonfly Dance (Michigan State University Press). Denise is also a Birch Bark Biting artist and traditional Jingle Dress dancer.

Full-color cover, After Boarding School: Mourning, is copyrighted by Klamath-Modoc artist Kaila Farrell-Smith, used with permission. It is in the permanent collection of the Portland Art Museum, purchased with funds from the Native American Art Council.

Mammoth author Maryfrances Wagner publishes new chapbook POUF

Maryfrances Wagner, Mammoth Publications author of the collection Dioramas, has published a new

chapbook of monologue poems in the voice of Aunt Mary, an Italian woman with one foot in America and one foot in Italy. Pouf is from Finishing Line Press. Wagner and William Trowbridge, Poet Laureate of Missouri, read together for the Thomas Zvi Wilson Reading series March 15, 6 pm, Johnson County Central Library on 87th St., Overland Park.

The character Aunt Mary is in a nursing home but does not have dementia other than a couple of hours a day she suffers from Sundowers. During those times, she thinks she's at home, in a hotel, a motel or anything on television is in real time and happening to her family. Her niece can become her mother, her son a doctor. The poems are humorous, but there is an underlying current of what it's like to be in a nursing home. This Italian American writer explores identities as they shift among geographies and inner landscapes.

See poems from Dioramas at the We Wanted To Be Writers website. 

Maryfrances Wagner has taught creative and academic writing for over twenty years, taught workshops at all levels, served as President of The Writers Place and is currently chair of TWP Programming Committee and board secretary for KC Creates. She is co-editor of I-70 Review and co-edited Whirlybird Anthology of Greater Kansas City Writers. She has published six collections to include Salvatore's Daughter, Red Silk (Thorpe Menn Book Award winner for literary excellence), Light Subtracts Itself (A KC Star Notable book of the year), and Dioramas. She has edited or co-edited three anthologies and also served as co-editor of New Letters Review of Books. 

Maryfrances Wagner launches DIORAMAS, 7 pm May 28, Raven Bookstore

See Maryfrances Wagner read from her new Mammoth book DIORAMAS, at Big Tent, 7 pm May 28, 7 East 7th St. (Raven Bookstore) in Lawrence! In an upcoming review, Charlotte Mandel writes, "These poems gift us with vibrant vignettes." Here's a sample:

RED-EYED CICADAS

Flutter and sputter, they motored in spurts.
They wobbled, tottered, popped from shrubs.
In their climb they lumbered one leaf at a time.
Shells clung to fences, bark, flower stems.
Mud tombs funneled the earth, life
in reverse. For days they spiraled up,
lopsided as choppers carrying heavy loads;
their voices were engines trying to turn.
Within a week, the full throttle of clack
and whine trilled from the highest limbs,
a bacchanal we couldn’t unplug. On every
walk one spun like a toppled windup toy
or reflected its iridescence from gutter
or lawn until one day the last sputter
fizzled out, and they were gone.

(c. 2015 Maryfrances Wagner. Used with permission)

About DIORAMAS: Maryfrances Wagner reinvents the process of memory as she guides readers through living tableaux of her past. Her views of Italian American life in the heartland annotates a rich cultural heritage. This award-winning poet shares a rich store of vivid imagery and passion, whimsy and reflection. Maryfrances Wagner lives in Kansas City, where she is a literary advocate and community builder. Wagner's writings about Italian American life have been anthologized by Pearson/Longman and others. Her work appears in New Letters, Laurel Review, Birmingham Review, Nebraska Review, Midwest Quarterly, and others. Her previous books of poetry include Salvatore's Daughter (BkMk), Red Silk (Mid-America), winner of the Thorpe Menn Book Award for Literary Excellence), and Light Subtracts Itself (Mid-American). She co-edits I-70 Review. William Trowbridge, Poet Laureate of Missouri, writes, "The poems in Dioramas focus mainly on moments lost to the sneak-thief Time, moments sometimes observed with an apt touch of humor. Whether she's writing about her Italian brother's blip of fame dancing past a lower corner of the TV picture in an Arthur Murray Party broadcast or about a good friend dying of AIDS or about the evanescent beauty of cicadas, Maryfrances Wagner does so with passion and craftsmanship, showing what a gifted poet with a generous heart can do."

MAMMOTH PUBLICATIONS READING 29 APRIL, TUES., 5:30 pm, K.U. Student Union

Join Mammoth authors and publishers for a celebration of Mammoth’s 10^th anniversary with readings by Xánath Caraza and Global Green partners Julie Unruh and Oliver Hall. Denise Low and Tom Weso, co-publishers of Mammoth and K.U. graduates, will read from Mammoth books. Refreshments will complete this end-of-the-workday event.  Other Mammoth authors will be introduced, including Stephen Meats.

MAMMOTH IS PUBLISHING A NEW BOOK BY CALEB PUCKETT

Watch for a new book coming from Mammoth Publications in March, 2014--FATE LINES/ DESIRE LINES by Caleb Puckett. Fate Lines/ Desire Lines balances between choice and compulsion, nature and persuasion. Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg writes: “Fate Lines/ Desire Lines, by Caleb Puckett, is a superb collection from a poet with an original voice and a daring approach to language. He speaks to all kinds of lines that define our lives, especially storylines about what our lives are and are not. Puckett inhabits the landscape of possibilities, designing his own poetic forms, re-inventing traditional forms, and giving new life to prose poems and free verse. Puckett prompts us to think through those lines we carry and carve across the earth. “ Cover art by Thomas Pecore Weso.

Originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, Caleb Puckett lives with his wife, sons, and dogs in Ottawa, Kansas, where he works as an academic librarian. He has two book-length collections from Otoliths, Tales from the Hinterland and Market Street Exit.  In addition to writing, Puckett serves as editor-in-chief for a library science journal, associate poetry editor for Nimrod International Journal, and editor for the online literary journal Futures Trading (futurestradinglit.weebly.com).

Pre-order at mammothpublications@gmail.com $12.00 (discount from $15.00 retail price)
Here is a sample poem:

Resurrection

 Lab-articulated Passenger Pigeons grow animate,

learn the lasting code of surrogate birds,
assimilate to survive a new world.
So much furtive futuring
with the wrong eyes
blinking belief
about history’s patent veracity.
What culture remains from this culturing?
Salvation’s negated by the damnation of seeming.
Passenger Pigeons pass clouds in body, dissolve in being. 

FATE LINES /DESIRE LINES © 2014 Caleb Puckett 978-1-939301-86-4 92 pages, 5 ½ by 8 ½ perfect bound.

DAVID RAY CONTRIBUTES AN ICE AGE POEM TO MAMMOTH PUBLICATIONS

Friend and poet David Ray contributed this to the Mammoth Publications Facebook page recently, and he gave permission for me to reprint it here. Mammoth is a small literary press co-published by Thomas Weso and Denise Low that specializes in Indigenous and mid-continent authors. (Mammoth is trumpeting for you!) Thanks to David for his attention to Pleistocene elephants and the procession of unfolding lineages. He is one of the most politically astute poets--he and Robert Bly edited the anthology  A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War in the 1960s. His commitment has never flagged.

New Species Revealed: Tiny Cousins of Humans

         Headline, New York Times

They were small as dolls,

David Ray, photo by Judy Ray

 and the elephants they hunted
 with spears were small too,
 as if to keep that island
 and its population between
Australia and Asia
 in proper proportion, for
 it too was small and fragile.
 Due to volcanic eruptions
 and other catastrophes
 there was never enough
 oxygen for humans
larger than Lilliputans
 or elephants as large
 as Ganesh, who brings
 good luck. In New Delhi
 we bought a model of him
in sweet-scented sandalwood.

Sadly, neither species --

 humans or elephants --
 matured enough
over time to join us
 as we strive for Utopia,--
 great empires, computers,
 cars, planes, telescopes,
 space travel, skyscrapers,
 and weapons far deadlier
 and more impressive
 than spears and slingshots.
I would love to sit down
and chat with these “small
archaic humans” and see
what they and the elephants
 might think of modern marvels.

© David Ray

David Ray edited New Letters for many years and taught creative writing at UMo.-KC. He has published widely and won awards, including the William Carlos Williams Award (twice), Paterson Award for Literary Excellence (twice), an NEA Fellowship, and more. He lives in Tucson with wife and poet Judy Ray. His most recent book is Hemingway: A Desperate Life.  Here is the publisher’s description: “David Ray’s poetic sequence counterpoints lyric and narrative, major and minor modes of amusement, admiration, and astonishment in beholding Hemingway’s Falstaffian posturings as well as his sufferings.  In the end, the poems express compassion for the 'desperate life' of this 'larger-than-life' personality.”  (Whirlybird Press, 2011, 124 pages, paperback, $12.00  ISBN  978-0-9647053-5-7 . Cover painting by Martha Armstrong, More than red, yellow and blue.)

http://www.davidraypoet.com/

http://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/qa_american_poetry/david_ray/
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/115/4#!/20599225