In Light’s Music, Charlotte Mandel focuses on both beginnings and ends. In her grandchildren and great grandchildren, she celebrates new life and her legacy going forward, her Jewish heritage honored and preserved—all from a voice reconciling and making close getaways from the inevitable as she prepares for the day “shadows come forth” and she can “dissolve” and rise “to rose-red smoke.” This chapbook is a strong distillation of precision in poetry and hope for us all.

–Mary Francis Wagner

Charlotte Mandel’s new chapbook, Light’s Music, has been published in Delphi Volume VIII with Blue Lyra Press.

Published by Dos Madres Press, Jane Augustine’s High Desert (2019) shares with H.D. a sense of the living landscape and an attention to the underlying connections between disparate spaces, experiences, and even times. As Mary Mackey notes, ” In High Desert, Jane Augustine brings us vast stretches of wilderness, richly textured images, political awareness, and the transformative power of paying close attention to ordinary objects. The range of the poems in this collection is all-encompassing, stretching from an intense, almost mystical, contemplation of the angled shadow of a deck rail to Syrian bombings, tsunamis, Suzuki roshi, and the Kaliyuga.”

This gorgeous collection not only evokes H.D., but also pays tribute to her in specific poems.

Michael Boughn’s new poetry collection, Hermetic Divagations – After H.D. (Swimmers Group, 2017) embraces the poetic method of H.D.’s Hermetic Definitions to arrive at a wholly new reflection on the many questions H.D. posed about war, love, spirituality, and survival–questions that retain their relevance for us today. Michael Boughn is the author of several books of poetry, including Cosmogrophia: A Post-Lucretian Faux Micro Epic (2010), which was nominated for the Governor General Award.

“Michael Boughn’s Hermetic Divagations is a luminous book of gratitude and persistence. Boughn weaves H.D.’s traditions, motifs and words in his own poised lines, examining a resonant image hoard—flame, angel, amber, lotus, worm, and owl, and thereupon continually re-discovering female figures emanating poise, eros and blessing amid confusion and depredation. “Then she is there” is a repeated realization. The work is at once a poetics of rumination evoking immanent presence and a meditation on the acts of war and rancor that harass grace.  Hermetic Divagations is a serious and lucid reworking of questions of civilization where “dung and myrrh // mingle with air and fear,” yet where one persists in seeking the “hidden entrance in a world // of restricted visibility.” – Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Poetry Collection, In June the Labyrinth by Cynthia Hogue, published by Red Hen Press, 2017

Poet and H.D. Scholar, Cynthia Hogue, has published her ninth poetry collection, In June the Labyrinth (Red Hen Press, 2017). This book-length poetry sequence shares a mythopoetic approach often found in H.D.’s poetry as well. Excerpts from In June the Labyrinth have also been featured in Tupelo Quarterly. 

Cynthia Hogue served as the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell University in the Spring of 2014. She was a 2015 NEA Fellow in Translation, and holds the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University.

Xoxox Press, a small press publisher in Gambier, Ohio, has issued a novella by Michelle Auerbach, titled Alice Modern.

Book Cover for novella, Alice Modern, a novel by Michelle Auerbach

Modernist poet H.D. and her lover, Winifred Ellerman (known as Bryher), are central protagonists in a graceful, erotically lush novella of 1930s Europe. Young Alice Modern tells the tale of leaving her bourgeois Jewish home in Vienna to work as a nanny in the household of H.D. and Bryher, caring for their young child Perdita. Entranced by the keen literary lives of “Kat” and “Gryphon” in Switzerland, Alice begins to transcend her tightly-bound life and discover who she is and might become. Her world opens and her sexuality awakens in a time of political turmoil and existential hazard, reckoning with her own inner storms and the approaching flames of fascism and holocaust.

“This taut, handsome tale brings the gone world so gleamingly to life you could imagine it was all happening just yesterday or earlier today or even tomorrow. Not only does Auerbach write excellent sentences, she deploys them with great care and craft to build a gripping tale of war, love, friendship, and the deep wells of the mind.” — Laird Hunt, author of Neverhome and Kind One