Poets House Showcase

Last weekend Deerbrook Editions was represented by Joan Siegel visiting the Poets House Showcase in the beautiful Jefferson Market Branch Library in New York. Her book "Hyacinth for the Soul" and Mimi White's "The Last Island" are the books in the showcase. All of our books are in the collection, and it is a good feeling knowing one or two are in the spring showcase. We look forward to Poets House settling into their new location. You can visit their website here.






See archive 03/08 - 03/15 (1) for more on Joan's book.









Through Saturday, April 11 
The 17th Annual Poets House Showcase
Don't miss the final days of this exciting display of all the new poetry and poetry-related books published in the United States in the last year. Over 2,000 titles—including chapbooks, DVDs, CDs, anthologies, translations and more—have been gathered together in the landmark Jefferson Market Branch Library.
New York Public Library 
Jefferson Market Branch 
425 Sixth Avenue (at West 10th Street ) 
For library hours, call (212) 243-4334

Dawn Potter Receives Fellowship

Attention should be given to the work of Dawn Potter. Dawn recently received a poetry grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation of Langley, Washington, a private foundation that supports writers.

Dawn is also associate director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching in Franconia, New Hampshire, where she works alongside former Maine poet laureate Baron Wormser.

Living in Harmony, Maine, Dawn makes her living as a free-lance book editor, and teaches creative writing. She can be found at the mainearts.maine.gov Arts Commission Directory of Maine Artists.

Recent writing includes a Milton memoir, "Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton" due out from the University of Massachusetts Press in May 2009.

Also of note, a series of essays about books that she has reread many times. So far they deal with Tolstoy's "War and Peace," Austen's "Mansfield Park," Bronte's "Shirley," Dickens's "David Copperfield," as well as some related essays and reviews that deal with storytelling, character, the sonnet form, etc. Several have or will appear in Sewanee and Threepenny, and a British journal called The Reader has also expressed interest.

Her first book, "Boy Land & Other Poems," is available at local bookstores in Maine, such as Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick and Longfellow Books in Portland.

Howard Levy had this to say about "Boy Land & Other Poems." "One of the most difficult things in poetry is to control the "I," to let it stay innocent, to let it act and be acted upon freshly in the poem. Dawn Potter manages this difficult trick with ease. In her poems, no matter where she is, the consciousness is always fresh, the perceptions always immediate and the human connections always moving, moving us, as we are by the moments of life coming into focus, newly seen and absolutely clear."

In 2010 Dawn will have a collection published by CavanKerry Press.

The Poetry of Living into Nonviolence

L.R. Berger recently visited Camden, New Jersey for an event with a Peace Community there. L.R. does many good things for peace and she gives wonderful readings. "The Unexpected Aviary" was well received. Thank you Cassie MacDonald. Thank you LR.

"Remembering Who We Are: The Poetry of Living into Nonviolence." This gathering (will be) was an opportunity to taste and see. If violence is, as John Dear has said, “forgetting who we are,” nonviolence is a means for “re-membering” who and whose we are. We’ll deploy poems and stories and gesture to ground ourselves in the power and grace at the heart of creative, active, spirit-centered nonviolent being and doing. LR Berger works as NE Associate of Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service as educator, poet, and counselor working with victims and perpetrators of violence through Restorative Practices. She is an advocate for the arts as means for social and personal transformation. Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service works around the world offering nonviolence education and information programs. The Peace Community in Camden is part of this church community.

L.R. Berger, author of "The Unexpected Aviary," won the 2003 Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry. Her book has been reviewed in Field and Pleiades. L. R. Berger's work has been supported by The National Endowment for the Arts, The New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, The PEN New England Discovery Award, The American Academy in Rome, The MacDowell Colony, The Appalachia Poetry Prize, The Blue Mountain Center and Hedgebrook.

Berger writes of her poems, "The world dares us to love it: that poignant, sturdy brand of love that can sometimes be wrestled out of the condition of our lives. These poems are driven by an ongoing necessity to take up this dare. They are both the means by which I wrestle and the hard-won outcome: a record of how I persisted, faltered or came to arrive at something approaching this love. "

Below, L.R. pictured in Camden's Sacred Heart. L.R. Berger is the New England Associate of Pace e Bene.