Bent Paddle Chapbooks
Go to the Bent Paddle Bookstore to purchase any of the books below.
We Make Shapes From Shapes
Poetry by Lee Kathryn Hodge
ISBN: 978-1-7327057-8-4
Bent Paddle Press, 2023, 40 pp., $14
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.
Rita Mae Reese, poet and co-director of Madison's Art + Literature Laboratory says of the 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."
—Rita Mae Reese (she/her) is the author of The Book of Hulga. Her work has won numerous awards, including a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Stegner Fellowship, and a “Discovery”/The Nation award. She designs Lesbian Poet Trading Cards for Headmistress Press, is in the bluegrass band Coulee Creek, and serves as the Co-Director at Arts + Literature Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin.
Click here to read some sample poems and hear the author read some of her work.
The Ring Toss Lady Breaks a Five
Poetry by Mark Kraushaar
ISBN: 978-1-7327057-7-7
Bent Paddle Press, 2023, 40 pp., $15
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.
Read some sample poems here.
A book of poetry by Richard Swanson
The Shoeshiner's Rag Pops and Sings: Poems New and Old and In Between.
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. Richard said he recognized the poetic value of these Mexican scenes and experiences he had there.
Read some sample poems here.
ISBN: 978-1-7327057-5-3
Bent Paddle Press, 2022, 90 pp., $15.
ISBN: 978-1-7327057-4-6
Bent Paddle Press, 2022, 108 pp., $14.
A book of poetry by Ron Czerwien.
100 Umbrellas
Tangentially inspired by the Dada artist Erik Satie, these poems are at once serious critiques of culture and absurdist and funny frolics through the English language."100 Umbrellas" by Ron Czerwien.
Read some sample poems here.
Cover art: “Sunset at Second Creek” © 2022 by Jeffrey W. Jensen.
ISBN: 978-1-7327057-3-9
Bent Paddle Press, 2022, 40 pp., $15.
Cutting the Dusk in Half
Poetry by Thomas J. Erickson
“Cutting the Dusk in Half” is full of crisp little stories: courtroom stories, travelling stories, love stories, dog stories and even an incantation to the Gods. One is called “True Stories,” but I suspect they all are that (with room for a little poetic truth stretching, of course). Erickson is candid, philosophical and down-to-earth. He weaves his signature dry humor throughout, knowing exactly how to end a poem with a perfect punch. The collection starts with National Emergency where he writes, “Besides, why would you want to shake hands with me? / You don’t even know me.” At that point, you’re in for a treat and by the end, you will want to shake his hand over and again.
Read some sample poems here.
Everything about Breathing
Poetry by B.J. Best.
2nd place winner in the 2019 WFOP Chapbook Contest!
Cover designed and letterpress printed by Wendy Vardaman (wendyvardaman.com).
ISBN: 978-1-7327057-1-5
Bent Paddle Press, 2019, 38pp., $12.
In Everything about Breathing author B.J. Best writes about simple things: snow boots, a rain gauge, an anemometer, clouds, lawnmowers. There is sadness and humor (sometimes together) and more good lines than most poets write in a good long lifetime. A couple examples to wit:
From “how clouds are formed”
the mice were skittering above the ceiling again, a little jazz percussion, just enough to jangle the metronome
of your sleep.
And from “snow boots”
they wait by the back door like a pair of gray cats,
ready to pounce on the snowswirls
mousing across the yard. i pour my feet
into those soft cisterns, and soon they’re lifeboats
floating across the troubled ocean
of a field, licking the land, kicking corn stubble,
This is not stuck-on-to-make-the-poem-sound-interesting language. This is poetic artistry at its best.
A little rain, a little more
Poetry by Ron Czerwien.
Cover art: "Blue Medley" © copyright Elwira Pioro.
ISBN: 978-1-7327057-0-8
Bent Paddle Press, 2018, 34 pp., $12.
Czerwien writes the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Snowflakes, owls, fathers, loves, premonitions; familiar but new. These poems surprise. They are conversations with friends you always knew you had but never knew you had. Poems of close attention; poems from that place poets go and bring back something entirely their own. Pull up your wing chair, sit awhile at this window on the world.
This is a wonderful new chapbook, ...full of feeling and elegy, language and play!
—Robin Chapman-poet, artist and Fellow of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences.[This] book is graceful, sad, strange and beautiful. Attending as carefully to things of language as to the observed world, the acuity of these poems is matched by their formal economy. Everything’s essential.
—Andy Gricevich-musician, performer, poet and editor of cannot exist.
You can read (and hear!) some sample poems here.
Read some sample poems here.
Bent Paddle Press, 2017, 50pp., $12.
Winner of the 2018 Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Chapbook Prize!
Canoeing a River with No Name
Poetry by Ronnie Hess.
Follow poet Hess on this riverine journey of thoughtful, nuanced poems. Hess' unique voice can come across as almost matter-of-fact, yet there are depths to her poetry that belie this seemingly straightforward tone. Rocks and rapids lie just underneath the gentle current and surprises wait around the next bend.
Read some poems here.
See the author's website here.
Bent Paddle Press, 2017, 25 pp., $12.
Sensorium
Poetry by Richard Merelman.
Merelman finds a way into the human condition with storied, deeply layered poetry. Merelman cares about his poems the way an expert woodsmith does his cabinets. He is an adept wordsmith and exquisite craftsman and polishes his works til they shine.
Read some poems here.
Bent Paddle Press, 2017, 25 pp., $12.
Winner of the 2017 Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Chapbook Prize!
Dove Tail
Art and Poetry by Sharon Auberle and Jeanie Tomasko.
Another poetry / artwork Collaboration between Jeanie & Sharon Auberle. The two exchanged drawings and then wrote poems to each other's art. A superb collaboration of both visual art and poetry!
Read some poems and see some of the artwork here.
Bent Paddle Press, 2017, 30 pp., $12.
The Collect of the Day
Poetry by Jeanie Tomasko.
Limited edition of 126 hand sewn chapbooks with French covers.
A blend of grief and beauty and prayer and hope with a touch (sometimes a big touch) of quirky.
Read some poems here.
Cover and interior art by Wendy Vardaman
wendyvardaman.com
ISBN: 978-1-7327057-2-2
122 pp. $15: Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets & Bent Paddle Press, 2021
Sheltering with Poems: Community & Connection During Covid
Bruce Dethlefsen, Kathleen Serley and Angela Voras-Hills, eds. With a foreword by Max Garland.
Go to the bookstore to purchase any of the books.
Wisconsin Poets Respond to the Coronavirus Pandemic
Sheltering with Poems, is an anthology of 98 poems from 74 Wisconsin writers co-published by the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and Bent Paddle Press.
The anthology is out of print. Sorry.
“When you’ve finished, you might want to reserve an accessible “home” for this collection on your bookshelf—perhaps to re-read to yourself, and almost certainly to share with others who are close to you. Before you’re even aware of it, Sheltering with Poems will have become an heirloom, handed down to you from a cataclysmic time and place. ”
“If there is shelter in poetry, or art itself, it’s a movable shelter an ancient antigen, shelter that preserves, but also reinvigorates; comforts, but also reawakens our latent capacity for healing.”
read a few sample poems, and a review by Marilyn Taylor.