Winner, 2006 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize:
Lisa Hammond
Moving House
ISBN: 978-1-933896-08-3 paper
$8.95
5 1/2 x 8 1/2   40 pp.

The poems in Moving House are grounded in the sometimes haunted landscapes of South Carolina, a setting rich with the flavors of ripe peaches and tomatoes and fresh-caught shrimp. The speaker of these poems turns her attention to the ordinary objects of her Southern home, seeing artistry in the scales of a fish, the pearly buttons of a linen shirt, a missed eclipse, a sprig of morning glory run wild. In the interaction between story, history, family, and memory, these poems find meaning rooted in the land, a source of both fear and wonder.

Lisa Hammond Rashley is an associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina Lancaster. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Southern Poetry Review, South Carolina Review, and North Carolina Literary Review.

"The Downstairs Dance Floor is a collection that moves a cast of characters—mother, father, step-father, child—from old photographs to lives tenuously clung to in contemporary nursing homes. Graham's compassion for her elders bespeaks her own sense of mortality, and every poem here captures the exact details— the position of hands in a snapshot or the pieces of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle—that reveal a mature talent. Dancing effortlessly through forms as demanding as the pantoum and villanelle, Graham transforms memory into the memorable."—R.S. Gwynn, Series Judge

Taylor Graham earned an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California. She has been a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler for the past thirty years; she and her husband, Hatch, have responded to hundreds of missions with their trained German Shepherds.

"Kevin Meaux's poetry is a delight. He gives that wonderful, odd sensation of brilliant poems: even though you read them silently, his words seem literally tactile in your mouth. Myths of Electricity is an exciting debut volume."—Robert Olen Butler

"Kevin Meaux's Myths of Electricity is an electrifying book. His subjects range from snake handling to Mikola Tesla, discoverer of the rotating magnetic field; from walking ghosts to bad angels; from Halley's Comet to the prophecies of nature; from his grandfather's farm to his parents' magical early marriage. Whatever the subject, Meaux writes with deep sympathy and tact in exciting language. He can even make poetry of imperfect bodies in a locker room! It has been some time since I've so greatly admired a chapbook."—Robert Phillips, Series Judge

Kevin Meaux was born in Kaplan, Louisiana, and educated at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is now teaching at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. His writing has received numerous awards, including a Ruth Lilly Fellowship as well as a Louisiana Division of the Arts Artist Fellowship. His poems have appeared in such journals as The Southern Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Shenandoah.

"The voice of these poems is intimate, probing, perplexed, witty, and delightfully intelligent. If not unequivocally admirable, Killough's literary forebears are, however, always her comrades, and through them she gains some purchase on the bloody contradictions in American life, especially when it comes to matters of race. At the heart of her poems . . . is Killough's richly textured lament urging us not to forget the tragic complexity of all we have inherited. The wondrous affirmation of this book is that in probing our contradictions Killough also reminds us of the richness of human possibility in the unfinished American democratic experiment."—Fred Marchant

Ann Killough is a teacher and writer, a North Carolinian transplanted to Boston. Her poems and reviews have been published in Fence, The Diagram, Poetry Ireland, The Shop, Poems & Plays, Poet Lore, Plainsongs, and elsewhere.

“Offering up sensuous language which is sometimes memorably formal and always musical, Nancy Naomi Carlson manages an eerie, provocative blend of poems about the different bodies of love a woman may inhabit. When she writes in ‘Sari-Covered Nights’ that ‘My five mouths roll their uvulas, / guttural as high winds crossing desert dunes,’ she speaks not only of the multiple lives we must recognize in ourselves, but also of the poet’s need and obligation to render many possibilities at once.”—Stephen Corey

A native New Yorker, Nancy Naomi Carlson’s full-length collection of poetry, Kings Highway, won the 1997 Writers’ Publishing House competition. She also was a winner of The Ledge 2002 Poetry Awards competition. Featured on Poetry Daily, her work has also appeared in Poet Lore, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Southern Humanities Review, Southern Poetry Review, Texas Review, and elsewhere. She is an editor for Tupelo Press and runs a community writers’ group at Barnes and Noble.

"William Notter dares to be simple in most of these poems, free-verse as clean and pared-down as his subjects and landscapes, including Nebraska’s emptiest county. I say ‘most’ because the world of his imagination also includes the unclean stench of rendering plants, the gathering of roadkill, the terror of raped women; and his forms include three haiku and a fine sestina. Notter writes of hard lives in poems that look deceptively simple."—Robert Phillips, author, Spinach Days and News About People You Know

"There is in Bill Notter’s poetry an astonishing honesty that does not diminish the complexity of his vision. He is an American poet—Midwestern, Western, and Southern. He is a realist and a great pleasure to read. This little book will increase in value as the years go by. What we have here is the onset of a major career." —James Whitehead

William Notter was educated at the University of Evansville and the University of Arkansas. He has received two Walton Fellowships for poetry and a Chester H. Jones Foundation award. His poems have appeared in such journals as Alligator Juniper and The Formalist. He currently lives in Reno, Nevada.