POETRY
OUR NATIONAL TREASURE
Concord Hymn, Ralph Waldo Emerson
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GUEST POET
Picking Blueberries…, Richard Widerkher
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A Suburban Perception…, Mike Ambrose
Coleridge On Scafell, Byron Beynon
Outsider, The Evidence Net, Christopher Barnes
The Long Summer, Ion Corcos
Where There is Distance, Holly Day
Going Into Marriage, Geosi Gyasi
Last May, Sarat Kumar Jena
Bones Die Hard, Emory D. Jones
Mother Earth, Gopal Lahiri
What Men Predict, Robert Lietz
Shaman, Kathleen Martin
The Virgin Spring, Ken Massicotte
Instructions For Falling, Tom Montag
A Poet’s Song, Akor Emmanuel Oche
Jocund Fireflies, Bamdev Sharma
Round, Fraser Sutherland
COVER AND GUEST PHOTOGRAPHER
Mark Wyatt
CONTRIBUTORS
Our National Treasure, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was an American writer publishing essays and poetry during the 19th century. Often associated with Unitarianism, he led the transcendental movement in the United States.
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MIKE AMBROSE is an engineering executive at a large aerospace company. He started writing poetry six years ago at the age of 48 when he was going through a challenging time in both his professional and personal life. He found poetry provided a balance and perspective that saved him from himself and has opened up a whole new way to see the world. Thank you Wallace Stevens, Lord Byron, and Robert Frost.
CHRISTOPHER BARNES won a Northern Arts writers award in 1988. He’s read at Waterstones bookshop to promote the anthology, Titles Are Bitches and debuted at Newcastle’s famous Morden Tower performing a reading of his poems. LOVEBITES was published by Chanticleer Press, 6/1 Jamaica Mews, Edinburgh. Each year he’s read for the Proudwords lesbian and gay writing festival and partakes in workshops.
BYRON BEYNON lives in Swansea, Wales. His work has appeared in several publications including Grey Sparrow, Kentucky Review, The London Magazine, Planet and Spoon River Poetry Review. His most recent collections are The Echoing Coastline (Agenda Editions) and Through Ilston Wood(Lapwing Publications, Belfast.)
ION CORCOS has been published in Axolotl, Bitterzoet, Every Writer, and Ishaan Literary Review. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee. He is currently travelling indefinitely with his partner, Lisa, and working on his first poetry collection, Like Clouds, and a chapbook inspired by Greece. Ion’s website is http://www.ioncorcos.wordpress.com
HOLLY DAY has taught writing classes at the Loft Literary Center in Minnesota since 2000. Her published books include Music Theory for Dummies, Music Composition for Dummies, Guitar All-in-One for Dummies, Piano All-in-One for Dummies, Walking Twin Cities, Insider’s Guide to the Twin Cities, Nordeast Minneapolis: A History, and The Book Of, while her poetry has recently appeared in New Ohio Review, SLAB, and Gargoyle. Her newest poetry book, Ugly Girl, just came out from Shoe Music Press.
GEOSI GYASI is a book blogger, reader, writer, and interviewer. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Visual Verse, Misty Review, Silver Birch PRESS, Linden Avenue, Expound, Tuck Magazine, Galway Review and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Geosi Interviews Fifty Writers Worldwide (2016) from Lamar University Press Books in Texas, U.S. He is the winner of the 2015 Ake/Air France Prize for Prose. He blogs at http://www.geosireads.wordpress.com
SARAT KUMAR JENA has four poetry collections which include Chaitra: Summer Poems (2014), Of Love: Memories and Myth (2015), Night is a Black Magic (2015), and A Season of Devine Love (2016). His forthcoming anthologies include; Devi and Other Poems (2016). He is currently editing a volume of love poetry; OneHundred Love Poems around the World, Volume. His poetry is an obsession with rural landscape, festivals, myth, folktales, spiritual love, agronomics, traditional values, and belief narratives which revolts against the coming of the material culture, urbanization, and existentialism everywhere. He is a senior researcher of Authenticity, Nationalism, and Representation in Comparative South Asian Literature at the Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar (Gujarat). He works as an Assistant Professor of Language, Culture and Media Studies at the University and Institute of Advanced Research, Gandhinagar. He is the editor of the Journal of Mass Communication and Journalism, Arts and Social Sciences Journal and chief editor of The Comparative Review. Currently he is co-editing Cultural Dimensions, Volume III.
EMORY D. JONES, Ph.D., is an English teacher who has taught in Cherokee Vocational High School in Cherokee, Alabama for one year, Northeast Alabama State Junior College for four years, Snead State Junior College in Alabama for three years, and Northeast Mississippi Community College for thirty-five years. He joined the Mississippi Poetry Society, Inc. in 1981 and has served as President of this society. He has over two hundred and thirty-five publishing credits including publication in such journals as Voices International, The White Rock Review, Free Xpressions Magazine, The Storyteller, Pasques Petals, The Pink Chameleon, and Encore: Journal of the NFSPS. He is retired and lives in Iuka, Mississippi, with his wife, Glenda. He has two daughters and four grandchildren.
ROBERT LIETZ’S poems have appeared in more than one hundred journals, including Agni Review, Antioch Review, Carolina Quarterly, The Colorado Review, Epoch, The Georgia Review, Mid-American Review, The Missouri Review, The North American Review, The Ontario Review, Poetry, and Shenandoah. Eight collections of poems have been published, including Running in Place, At Park and East Division, The Lindbergh Half-century (L’Epervier Press,) The Inheritance (Sandhills Press,) and Storm Service and After Business in the West: New and Selected Poems (Basal Books.) Besides the print publications, poems have appeared in several webzines. A net search for “Robert Lietz poetry” will provide a representative selection. In addition, Lietz spends a good deal of time taking, post-processing, and printing photographs he has been making for the past several years, examining the relationship between the image-making and the poems he has made and is exploring.
KATHLEEN MARTIN after years of publishing in the academic world of science/mathematics education, seeks to share the delights of the third epoch of life through her poetry. In her work she tries to make visible the secret joys of elder years.
KEN MASSICOTTE normally lives on Vancouver Island where he teaches English as a Second Language at the University of Victoria. He is currently residing in the UK. He has published in several journals, including: River Poets Journal; Turk’s Head Review; Glass: A Journal of Poetry; Retort Magazine; Wilderness House Literary Review; and Every Day Poems.
TOM MONTAG, Fairwater, Wisconsin, is most recently the author of In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013 (a finalist for the Midwest Independent Publishers Association’s award for poetry, 2014). In 2015 he was the featured poet at Atticus Review (April) and Contemporary American Voices (August). Other recent poems will be found at Hamilton Stone Review, The Homestead Review, Little Patuxent Review, Mud Season Review, Poetry Quarterly, Third Wednesday, Town Creek Poetry, and many other journals.
AKOR EMMANUEL OCHE is a Nigerian poet and critic, globally anthologized.
BAMDEV SHARMA was born in 1967. He has been a university teacher in English poetry and language for over twenty years. Sharma came to poetry when he took part in a school level competition at 17 years of age. With a completion of a masters degree in 1993, he took interest in poetry and started to write poems in English. In 2007, he secured a residency with a poetry writing scholarship in South Korea and became engrossed in poetry. Poems have been published in Tintota, Events Quarterly, Jelly Fish, Snow Jewel and many more. Sharma has two collections of poems: The Bunyan and the Alder, 2007 in the US, and The Duet of Rivers, 2016 in Japan and some are underway. Sharma is also associated with several national and international poetry forums. As a research writer at the university, he has written several books for students and critical reviews of many good poets around the world.
FRASER SUTHERLAND is a poet and lexicographer who lives in Toronto, Canada. He’s published 17 books, nine of them poetry, most recently The Philosophy of As If.
RICHARD WIDERKHER received his M.A. from Columbia University and won two Hopwood first prizes for poetry at the University of Michigan. He has two book-length collections of poems: The Way Home (Plain View Press) and Her Story of Fire (Egress Studio Press). Tarragon Books published his novel, Sedimental Journey, about a geologist in love with a fictional character. Recent work has appeared in Rattle, Floating Bridge Review, Cirque, Penumbra, Clay Bird Review, Sediments, Crack The Spine, and Salt River Review. He reads poems for Shark Reef Review.
MARK WYATT has been photographing on city streets since around 1980. He posts one or two images a week to his personal blog, mwwyatt.wordpress.com, and has only just recently begun showing his work. “Photojournalism’s promise is to open doors to the truth. Street photography, on the other hand, opens doors to the imagination. We are compelled by nature to evaluate others’ emotions in order to understand our own, and cannot help but feel sorrow when we see sorrow, and feel joy when we see joy. Street photography succeeds by feeding that inborn trait.” These photographs encourage the viewer to explore the connection that binds each of us to the family of man.
Grey Sparrow Journal 