Dan Memmolo's poetry has appeared in   Another Chicago Magazine, New York Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, Sycamore Review,  Controlled Burnand Lily. His chapbook, BEAT SURRENDER, was selected as a finalist for Main Street Rag's annual chapbook contest and has been published as part of their Editor's Choice Chapbook Series.

October 19, 2007
Rodger Martin has published one volume of poetry, The Nemo Poems.  He is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, a Council for Basic Education Fellowship, a New Hampshire State Council on the Arts Fellowship in fiction, and the APPALACHIA prize for poetry.  His poetry, fiction, and critical work has been published throughout the United States and in China, where he has been anthologized in Selected Poems of Contemporary American and European Poets.  As managing editor, The Worcester Review has received both a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Pushcart nomination.

Photo by Deb Porter-Hayes

Mouse

of my Toyota. I think it is a twig

until I see its utter pinkness,

glimpse of matted fur dark with blood.

I’m afraid of that small corpse,

can’t stand its weightlessness.

And I wonder what to do with it. 

Bury it in the backyard

or let it soften under leaves?  What

about the cat?  I can’t bear

thin bones snapping.

of this drama. 

I was only doing thirty.

Lives catch under wheels.

I must stop my rushing,

these continuous murders.

Lisa C. Taylor teaches creative writing at EASTCONN Arts at the Capitol Theater (ACT), an arts magnet high school in Willimantic, Conn.    She is also a writer-in-residence for EASTCONN and coordinates the Connecticut State Department of Education  interdistrict grant Imagination Connections where she helps 300 second graders write storybooks or books of poetry with a partner class.  This grant is managed by EASTCONN.  

 Lisa received her B.A. in English and M.A. in Counseling from University of Conn.  She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Stonecoast Writing Program (www.usm.maine.edu/stonecoastmfa) in Portland, Maine.  Talking to Trees, published by Finishing Line Press (www.finishinglinepress.com) , a poetry publisher in Georgetown, Kentucky, is Lisa’s third collection of poetry.  Her work has been widely published in journals, anthologies and literary magazines, most recently Birmingham Review, Pine Island Journal of New England Poetry, The Healing Muse, and Red Rock Review, and she has had poetry nominated for the Pushcart Prize.  She has participated in readings all over New England including Hartford’s First Night, Willimantic’s Third Thursday streetfest and numerous cafes and bookstores.   For more information about her writing, go to her web site www.lisactaylor.com.  An Audio Book CD of this collection is available at readings and through her web site.

About Talking to Trees, the poet and non-fiction writer, Baron Wormser has written:

“At the core of Lisa C. Taylor’s poetry resides an honesty of awe, a bittersweet awareness of how little we know and how much we care.  Her poems often seem like parables.  Through adroit, haunting images, she traces our fraught, and at times dire intersections.  A poet of both depth and gravity, she never averts her gaze yet her tone remains tender—a heartfelt sagesse.”

            New York poet and translator Laure-Anne Bosselaar writes:  “Whether recalling the ‘thistle and crash’ of her youth or capturing the ‘sweet heat of time and alchemy’, Lisa C. Taylor’s poems shift between internal and external landscapes with remarkable fluidity.”

            Annie Finch, poet, and writer and the director of the Stonecoast MFA writes: “Lisa C. Taylor’s poems are marked by their arresting combination of fertile, funky natural imagery with courageous and searching emotional honesty.  As she writes, ‘in the eventual darkness/this will be what matters.’” 

            Lisa’s poetry deals with the contemporary world and issues of grief, love, and life transitions.  Lisa says, “Like dance, poetry for me can be about the smallest movements.  A mouse caught in a hubcap, two estranged lovers standing in front of a church with their children, an old woman praying, the first snow—these moments can be captured and preserved as a necessary part of our humanity.  I strive to give a voice to those who cannot or will not speak for themselves—both old and young.”