OK, you’re thinking, what do these pictures have to do with poetry, chapbooks or design? You’re right, nothing, but there’s plenty of that on the other pages. And then, there’s just something about water. Water is never wrong.

Inspired by the writing of author Linda Hogan and written contemplating the loss of three friends by suicide. This collection is composed of two heroic sonnet crown sequences, each formed by fourteen interlocking sonnets bound together through line repetition and concluding with a final master sonnet.  

The contest judge, Pam Uschuk, says of “We Make Shapes From Shapes,”

“This sculpted gem of a chapbook composed of two linked crown sonnets won my heart and mind with its fine-tuned craft which expertly holds and transmutes tremendous grief.  Hodge masters this challenging sonnet form by taking liberties to make it pliable as she writes about the three suicides of those close to her, including the suicide of her father, a Viet Nam veteran.  What I admire is that this form which could easily overwhelm the lyric narratives does not intrude on either the narratives or her passionate emotions.  Reading through these sonnets, the reader is pulled by Hodge’s fresh language and imagery, her passion, and  her vulnerability.  I admire also her deft embedding of lines from Linda Hogan’s Geodes and The History of Red. Images like, ‘weather too dangerous to spell’ or ‘There was a greater kindness/in that stern disposition/your fractures catching/that light in the broken ones/’

Hodge’s linked sonnets are at once deeply moving, unsettling and beautifully wrought.  Hodge continually surprises me.  This is masterful poetry at its best.

Rita Mae Reese had this to say about Lee’s book:

Lee Kathryn Hodge opens "We Make Shapes from Shapes" with the plaintive, imperative line: "Call back to us; relent." The starkness of the language draws the reader gently into the undertow of grief, in this case the grief over three friends lost to suicide. These losses are examined through not one but two double crowns of sonnets ("Horizon" and "Krater"), both ending with a final master sonnet (which uses all of the beginning and ending lines of the preceding sonnets). The structure conveys a sense of retracing steps, of trying to make things fit together, and ultimately to make sense of irrevocable absences. Through the lines borrowed from Linda Hogan and the joining and rejoining of phrases and images, "We Make Shapes from Shapes" mourns the dead while also recognizing and even celebrating that we are fragile beings all living as we must in rooms "made / of flammable matter."

Click the button to read some sample poems and listen to the author read her work.

Mark Kraushaar’s work has been included in Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, and Yale Review as well as the web site Poetry Daily and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, and has been a recipient of Poetry Northwest’s Richard Hugo Award. A full-length collection Falling Brick Kills Local Man was published by University of Wisconsin Press as the winner of the 2009 Felix Pollak Prize. His collection, The Uncertainty Principle (Waywiser Press), was chosen by James Fenton as winner of the Anthony Hecht Prize.

Poet Alan Shapiro has written of Mark Kraushaar’s poetry as “the best counterargument to the specious claim that narrative poetry is either old fashioned, ‘linear’ or predictably ‘conventional.’ These poems have all the excitement and complexity of life as we live it now, together with a depth of speculation that is positively stunning in the light it casts on the intimate nooks and crannies of social experience that all of us encounter but either fail to notice or find words for…”

ISBN: 978-1-7327057-5-3
Bent Paddle Press, 2022, 90 pp., $15.

Long a member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, Swanson exemplifies the mission of that organization: dedicated to promoting awareness and appreciation of poets and poetic heritage in the state. This collection gathers poems from 5 of his previous books as well as a large section of previously unpublished poems about his time spent in Mexico with his longtime partner. These 21 poems detail the sunshine as well as the dark corners of Mexico, but always written with Swanson’s wit, charm and humanity.

Madison Poet Laureate Angie Trudell Vasquez interviewed Ron Czerwien about 100 Umbrellas for the Madison radio station WORT.