Books and Authors

New Book by Jeanne Shannon

Released in October 2011

In A Rose Wood Wandering
(Author's Bio)
Jeanne Shannon, ISBN 978-0-9839935-1-3
Published by Mercury HeartLink 2011
Price: $15.00

In a Rose Wood Wandering is a collection of poems, stories, meditations, and reveries that explore facets of the word and the idea of Rose. It roams through gardens, orchards, and forests burgeoning with large and small members of the family Rosaceae, visits women named Rose, and even looks at rose-patterned china teacups and silver spoons with roses on their handles..

The book reflects the author's intense interest in the world of plants. As a friend of hers once said, "She has a love affair with trees." Not only trees, but shrubs and flowers, as well as lowly wildflowers that some dismiss as weeds. She has a special fondness for the family of roses.

Jeanne Shannon grew up in rural southwest Virginia, in a farming community attuned to the Earth and its plant and animal life. Members of the rose family were abundant, and the region was known for its apple orchards. Early on she became interested in the fact that plants are divided into families, and the huge family group that includes the rose captured her special attention.

Her poetry, short fiction, and memoir essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She has published three full-length collections of her work and several chapbooks. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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New Book by Bonnie K. Rucobo

Released in September 2011

King Pachuco and Princess Mirasol
(Author's Bio)
Bonnie K. Rucobo, ISBN 978-0-9779933-6-9
Published by The Wildflower Press, 2011
Price: $10.00

King Pachuco and Princess Mirasol is the author's first middle grade children's novel. The book is the tale of two characters who find themselves far from home transformed into a Lilac-headed Amazon parrot and a lovebird. They live for a time in the kitchen of an elderly Hispanic couple in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Then they plan their escape into the night sky and their perilous journey home.

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The Wildflower Press - Current Books

Set in Motion (Author's Bio)
Karen McKinnon, ISBN 978-0-9779933-4-5
Published by The Wildflower Press, 2009
Price: $14.00

A memoir in journal entries, letters, and poems. It begins with a “chance” encounter between the author, a poet, as a young woman returning from a year in Europe and a sympathetic “soul-brother,” Pastor Ian MacKenzie. The pastor raises the question, “What is writing for?” that sticks with the poet from then on. When the two meet again in Scotland after 40 years, they renew friendship and exchange letters. As the original encounter spirals into a memoir spanning two lifetimes, it touches not only on writing, but also on intuitions, present and past lives, yoga, tarot cards, and other realms of the Spirit that map the soul of the poet and the minister. McKinnon’s precise, unpretentious prose speaks directly from the heart. Supplemented with a rich selection of McKinnon’s poetry, as well as MacKenzie’s imaginative correspondence, Set in Motion reveals not only what writing is for, but also the purpose of reading.

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Eleven A.M. (Author's Bio)
Poems by Julie Dunlop, Gayle Elen Harvey, Lyn Lifshin and Jeanne Shannon. No ISBN.
Price: $9.00

Poems inspired by subjects as diverse as sunflowers, geese, landscapes, paintings (Hopper, Miró, Van Gogh), bees and the people who keep them, and Katherine Mansfield’s garden party.

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No Hole In The Flame: A Memoir on Love
and Grief in Poetry and Prose
(new and expanded edition)

Maryhelen Snyder. ISBN 978-0-9779933-2-1 (Author's Bio)
Price: $15.00

A memoir of the author’s long marriage and a recounting of how she coped with her husband’s sudden death. An extraordinary set of glimpses into a marriage and a bereavement delivered with remarkable honesty and self-knowledge.

Note: This new edition includes a chapter called "Afterward: Legacy," her thoughts about the legacy her late husband Ross left behind. The chapter is in the form of a letter to their grandson, who never knew his grandfather.

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The Painted Clock: Memoirs of a New Mexico
Ghost Town Bride

Phyllis Hoge Thompson. ISBN 0-9714343-4-4
Price: $19.00

Author's web site: http://www.phyllishoge.com

The true story of how a couple, somewhat along in years, attempt to adapt themselves to the surprises of life in the almost uninhabited ghost town of Mogollon, New Mexico. Newly married, husband and wife try to figure out each other as well as the character of their chosen home, from the ramshackle remains of the beautiful old mining town to the wonderful idiosyncrasies of their neighbors.

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Stars Scattered Like Seeds

Jeanne Shannon; ISBN 0-9714343-5-2 (Author's Bio)
Price: $14.95

Poems and stories drawn from the author’s early life in the Appalachian mountains of Southwest Virginia.

Writing about this book, acclaimed novelist Lee Smith says, “Jeanne Shannon has an astonishing ability to capture the exact feeling of time gone by. Her gift for precise imagery has given me back whole chunks of my earlier life. What a wonderful writer she is!”

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ANGELUS

Released in May 2006
Angelus: Poems (Author's Bio)
Jeanne Shannon, ISBN 1-56474-455-8
Published by Fifthian Press, 2006
Price: $14.00

Poems reflecting epiphanies of the heart, the imagination, and the mind. The poems are for the most part sensuous, although many are given to ideas, including an entire section devoted to the Canonical Hours.

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Accidental Magic

Peggy Pond Church; ISBN 0-9714343-6-0 (Author's Bio)
Price: $19.95

Poems by the late Peggy Pond Church (1903-1986), one of the American West’s major (and too often overlooked) poets.

As well as painting vivid word-pictures of the Southwestern landscape, Church examined the dilemmas of life in the modern world, particularly those that came with the arrival of the atomic age, and addressed them in her work. In this collection she also turns her gaze courageously upon herself, her family, and her friends and provides an autobiography in poems.

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Passage to Teheran

Harvena Richter; ISBN 0-9714343-7-9 (Author's Bio)
Price: $12.00

A somewhat fictionalized account of a trip taken by the author in 1956.

They were two poet/journalists off on a writing junket. The route their Vespa scooter followed to Teheran took them from Genoa to Venice, across to Trieste, into Yugoslavia, down through Greece and into Turkey, and over the pass where Xenophon came storming in the other direction. Through deserts, by Mt. Ararat, by bones of cattle and dead trucks, by the walking skeleton of a bearded artist going home from India. Through Maku, Khoi, and Tabriz, the old capital of Persia. It would be the most dangerous journey of their lives.

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Coming True

Poems by Karen McKinnon; ISBN 0-9668073-1-6 (Author's Bio)
Published by Watermelon Mountain Press, 2000
Price: $14.95

“Karen McKinnon is the consummate poet of any world common to any one of us. It’s as if she took on the burden of thinking about it, the days passing, the nights with their various confusion…the irreducible place of human relationships. . .the presence of someone’s telling, thinking, feeling in the world, as we do – who is here too, now and forever, in these pages.”

From the Introduction by Robert Creeley

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Couture Collection (Author's Bio)

Sapphire Pleiades; ISBN 978-0-9779933-3-8
Price: $12.00

A collection of poems filled with delicate encoding that is a pleasure to puzzle out. They play upon the idea that one can fashion the self. Written in short lines, quatrains piled high upon each other, their appearance on the page resembles a tall, thin fashion model in high heels. Beyond the playfulness, they are meditations that are rich in intuitive insights. The author "affirms pleasure and God to be one and also the source of all poetics." The book includes a glossary that is a pleasure to read and can make the puzzles easier to solve.

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