Taking Pre-Sales for This River

Wrap-around cover of This River, due out December 1, 2014

***

I have the go-ahead from antoinette nora claypoole, my editor, that I can begin pre-sales now for this new poetry book coming out December 1, 2014, from Wild Embers Press, of Oregon, under their Watersongs Imprint.  

www.wildembers.com and http://watersongsbooks.blogspot.com

Also, for current info from Watersongs Books:  http://watersongsbooks.blogspot.com/2014/10/fall-list-of-authors.html

This journey to publication has a fast  pace, but quickly to my astonishment things have all come together.  We have, at Antoinette Nora’s persistence, with the help of Natalya Ilyina, in Kostroma, received permission to use Sergei Rumyantsev’s small painting on the cover, a painting of the Volga River which flows through the ancient city of Kostroma, Russia. We also found Edmund (Mike) Keeley, still teaching creative writing at Princeton, who gave us permission to use his translation of C.P Cavafy’s little poem “Growing in Spirit,” which is the epitaph for poem 18.

This River is about love across boundaries, once hostile, and about rivers and how they water our lives and our spirits.  My new friend Mikhail’s love of his Volga stirred me profoundly.  I, too, in 1990, when we met, lived by a great North Carolina river, the Haw, and it was my custom to go there on a Sunday morning to write a new poem.  So in 1990-91 This River was born as I yearned toward the Volga and was comforted by the Haw.

The books will become available early in November, and you can order them now for $14 + $1 tax, and $3, mailing cost.  So they’re $15 to pick up, and $18 to have them mailed.  If you order two, it’s only $33 to be mailed, or $30 for picking up. I can send two books for the price of one today in the U.S. postal service.  After two, the postage is free from me.  Buy them for gifts in the upcoming holiday season.  Your purchases help me pay for review copies, which I want to get out in early November.  Here are some more comments from fellow poets on This River.

***
In This River the speaker’s observations of nature are liquid with impassioned drive. The phrases in this poem are smooth flowing, and this fluency in language seems a reflection of the river where she studies and meditates.  Each eddy, and bird, and leaf is clearly drawn and vital to the sense of place and self.  Identities of the self and qualities of desire are pulled into her observations and transformations and move us as the river moves.

Foster Foreman, Poet (Soundings) and Co-Editor of Hyperion Poetry Journal and Thorp Springs Press.

***
In This River, Judy Hogan takes paths forged by Proust and Virginia Woolf down and in to the deepest most nuanced passages of the soul. Using a great Piedmont river as matter, metaphor, and muse she shows one woman’s transcendent journey beyond vulnerability to a place of abiding grace. 
This River is not only beautiful poetry, but a compelling story as well. 

Joanie McLean, author of Place and Up From Dust

***
Please celebrate with me.  This River has waited 24 years to come into print.  You’ll love it! It may be my best poetry book that has been published so far.

Thanks to my intrepid editor antoinette nora claypoole.