Quartet 1

By Nancy Carroll, Anne Yale, Cody Deitz, and Melisa Malvin-Middleton

Quartet 1: Native Blossoms Chapbook Series

This quartet features the first four books in the Native Blossoms Chapbook Series: Night Walks by Nancy Carroll, with twenty-eight poems that focus on small, familiar moments of light and loss; Liturgy of Small Feathers by Anne Yale, a collection of twenty-two poems that form a response to the sacred in verse; Pressed Against All That Nothing by Cody Deitz, seventeen monumental poems that give witness to a brother’s withdrawal into addiction; and Hover the Bones by Melisa Malvin-Middleton, nineteen poems that dig through the “garden of the familiar”—family relationships—to unearth profound connections and upsetting loss.

Praise for these four books:

“Like a lovely walk between photograph and landscape, the poems in Nancy Carroll’s debut collection sear images of memory and melancholy into delicately painted pictures of earthy determination that energize as they disquiet. Existing in the contemplative space of ekphrastic remembering and familiar loss, these poems take the illusory and reconfigure it into an enduring and tangible wonder that you will want to return to again and again.”
~ Deborah Blakely, Poetry Co-Editor at Redheaded Stepchild Magazine

“The worship sung in Anne Yale’s Liturgy of Small Feathers graces those who share life’s struggles, large and small. Lost love, PTSD, and questions of faith are at once bowed to in mourning and in rapture. Her world, so recognizably our own, offers its breath and coaxes us close, wraps our troubles with peace.”
~ Clint Campbell, author of Wake of Leaves

“Cody Deitz’s collection documents a brother’s disappearance into addiction, a black hole around which the family spins. After stints in prison, psych care, and rehab, he reemerges barely recognizable — a figure that, like Zeno’s paradox, the speaker can never fully reach, ‘the idea of progress // suddenly unfathomable.’ These events are embodied and presented in vivid, resonant details: Joshua trees, shoe prints in desert sand, the mouths of empty Marlboro packs, the crackle of a prison telephone. In his precise and yet discursive verse, Deitz’s poetic attention is ‘More than turning on a light—it’s becoming // the bulb and the switch and the finger. . .’ ”
~ Heidi Czerwiec, author of Self-Portrait as Bettie Page and A is for A-ké, The Chinese Monster

“In Hover the Bones, burying a miscarried child looks like planting a seed in a garden, and trimming vines feels like taking the place of a dead mother. The book’s epigraph from Audre Lorde reminds us that “we were never meant to survive,” and the final poem leaves us with a peaceful benediction: ‘May we be well. / May we be happy. / May we be free from suffering.’ Melisa Malvin-Middleton has created beauty out of darkness.”
~ Katie Manning, Founding Editor-in-Chief of Whale Road Review, and author of Tasty Other and The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman