Cherry Pie chapbooks on Fiddler Crab Review

Two of the Cherry Pie chapbooks have been reviews on Fiddler Crab Review's website. Niki Nymark's A Stranger Here Myself, and Donna Biffar's Kiss Me Cold, were reviewed by Mary Ellen Geer, who has been an editor at Harvard University Press and has published a poetry chapbook through Finishing Line Press.

The Fiddler Crab website / blog is a great resource for seeing the range of what's available in poetry chapbooks. It's a new venture, and full of energy -- see it here: http://fiddlercrabreview.blogspot.com/.

Poem Bakeoff Winners!

Thanks to all who sent in a poem for the Cherry Pie Poem Bakeoff. Competition was hot, plentiful, and -- I'm glad to report -- yummy. I had planned on picking a single entry, but there were three competing for that spot, even after multiple read-throughs. So the results include a first-place winner, and also a second-prize and third-prize winner. I'll also mention some choice lines from other poems.

The first-prize winner will receive free copies of all three Cherry Pie chapbooks to be published in 2008. Since second and third prizes are now included (it's just so hard to say "no" when the poems are good!), those winners can each select one free chapbook from the 2008 selections.

The three Cherry Pie chapbooks for 2008 are:
The Urge To Believe Is Stronger Than Belief Itself, by Erin M. Bertram (May 2008)
A Stranger Here Myself, by Niki Nymark (late summer 2008)
Weaving the Light, by Mary Ruth Donnelly (fall 2008)


Here are the winning poems.

First Prize goes to an untitled cinquaine (loosely) from Dianne Ladendecker. I was charmed and astonished each time I read this economical little wonder.

The brine
Then there's the knife
It's out of proportion
I hear eerie sounds of half-life
Opera

Second Prize goes to Gaye Gambell-Peterson for a pantoum about a middle-aged mermaid. I was intrigued by the well-used effect of the pantoum's interlocking structure, and completely sold on the "C-sharp half-life, caught in the half-light" which mingles echoes of music, radiation/decay/science, time, and water so beautifully.

Mermaid’s Pantoum

I am unrepentant mermaid, middle aged.
Flesh and scales still in seemly proportion,
though wrinkled by brine and tattered by time.
Still adored, a diva of fathomed opera.

Flesh and scales still in seemly proportion,
a siren, chanteuse, my voice a knife-edge
shrill, adorned. A fathomed opera’s diva
in a C-sharp half-life, caught in the half-light.

A siren, chanteuse, my voice a knife-edge
cutting through tides. Me, under the weather,
caught in sea’s half-light with only a half-life,
still luring men with plaintive arias.

Cutting through tides, me, under the weather
though wrinkled by brine and tattered by time,
still luring men with plaintive arias.
A middle-aged mermaid, unrepentant am I.

And Third Prize goes to Elizabeth M. Johnson, who gains an extra point for incorporating the full title of a Cherry Pie chapbook (Kiss Me Cold). Some of the required five words in this poem were used in variant forms (e.g. disproportionate instead of proportion) and although I've seen many contests be strict on that count, I'm constitutionally unable to be strict and so will allow it. The poem's worth it.

Ending It

Last summer, in the months without an “R,”
we ate oysters, the jagged edges of
the shells were sharp against our tongues, the brine
cool in our throats, delicious as the crisp

sea salt against our skin, the beach bonfire,
the Great Bear asterism far above,
an operatic swell in the timeline
of us, peace tenuous but in our grasp.

But now the months have “Rs.” Also, “-embers.”
You lumber toward me, and I try to move
away; your heavy body next to mine
seems wildly disproportionate. You clasp

me, kiss me, cold, your lips a slick steel knife
at my throat. No half measures, just half life.

Congratulations on the great poems! The other entries were wonderful, and I hope everyone had fun with the contest.

Notable lines or moments from other entries, that I just couldn't resist:

From Bobbi Lurie, a prose poem that started off: "brine she says is nothing but the half-life of the pickle. . . "

And from Gail Eisenhart, a sinister love poem that included: "this tryst / has the half-life of house-fly."

To wrap up, an unexpected "non-winner" that simply must be mentioned for its refusal to follow any rules, and for the delightful poem that resulted. This is from Katherine Mitchell, who attempted a poem using the five required words but ended up with a poem that used a form of one of the words, did not use the other four at all, and is titled as a haiku but is, in fact, not a haiku. So here is a poem of . . . great resistance? Katherine sent it in as a non-entry, and I reproduce it here as such. Not a prize-winner, but in many ways a winner!

Summer Haiku

paddle boats float
on two tanks
painted copper lake

paddlers wear pajamas
hold champagne flutes
small rising circles
happy tongues

water smoothed
butter knives in cake frosting

orange bursts
over the horizon
sending heat
inside our paper lantern faces

Contest -- Cherry Pie Poem BakeOff Contest

To celebrate Poetry Month and the three chapbooks forthcoming from Cherry Pie in 2008, we're announcing the first annual Cherry Pie Press Poem BakeOff Contest.

1st Prize: Free copies of each of the three chapbooks to be published in 2008 (by Erin M. Bertram, Niki Nymark, and Mary Ruth Donnelly). Even better, the winner's poem will be published here on the Cherry Pie Press blog.

Rules: Contest is open now through the end of April 2008. To enter, write an original poem in any style or format using all five of the words listed below (one word selected from each of the published Cherry Pie chapbooks). You can see this contest will increase in difficulty each year as the list of publications grows, so enter now while it's still easy!!!

Words to use: brine, half-life, knife, proportion, opera

Notes:
brine is from Colleen McKee's My Hot Little Tomato.
half-life is from Helen Eisen's The Permeability of Memory.
knife is from Donna Biffar's Kiss Me Cold.
proportion is from Nan Sweet's Rotogravure.
opera is from Martha Ficklen's The Palm Leaf Fan.

Submission of entries: Send your poem in an email by midnight April 30, 2008 to cherrypiepress@yahoo.com. Please put "Poem BakeOff" in the subject line, and include your name with the entry. Submission of a poem for the contest implies permission to publish the winning poem on the Cherry Pie Press blog.

Eligibility and Judging: Poets previously published by Cherry Pie, or scheduled for publication in 2008, are not eligible to enter. Judging, due to the perennially low budget here, will be done solely by the Editor (me).

Kiss Me Cold, by Donna Biffar

Just out, Donna Biffar's chapbook, Kiss Me Cold. This is the latest release in the Midwest Women Poets Series from Cherry Pie Press. It's a beautiful collection of poems. I love Donna's work -- it's edgy, brutally honest, and finely crafted. Here's one that sets my teeth on edge:

Breakfast

each morning the same want,
eggs, brown, from a nearby farm,
indiana maybe,
all natural, this need,
clenching the warm yolk
between my teeth, wet
food, muscle, sweat,
what i want, what shudders, breaks,
beneath the shell

She has a keen and sensitive eye for form. She plays with the sonnet form and comes up with something interesting --

Wordless Sonnet

What words are spoken here?
through soft and foreign seasons
the language of flesh, kiss. Now this
landscape of monkey vines and oak,
the one eyed birdhouses,
two poison berries on a tree
we cannot name.

But this is not our garden. Borrowed,
as your body, mine,
beneath a sky we’ve seen
and haven’t seen—soundless
among the frozen moss,
the harsh-barked trees, our words thin
in the hard freeze, budding, even now.

Her poems walk a tightrope between passion and guilt, following two married people drawn into an affair. There's tension in the subject matter and in the syntax and line breaks. The poems are haunted by the attraction and its darker side, and Donna Biffar uncovers loneliness and loss with a deft hand and a direct hit. The language in these poems is powerful and exciting, honed down to its sharpest edge. It has the power to illuminate lust and to acknowledgment its animal heart.

One of the ways I pick chapbooks to publish is to read the poems over, daily, for a week. If they still surprise and excite me at the end of the week, I know the writer's on to something. I never get tired of her sense of sound and her instinct for line breaks. Donna Biffar is definitely on to something. That was evident, in fact, from the first poem in her collection:

When Conversation Thins

Something animal in his hand
when he shifts gears
and we shift
from office talk to flesh.
Our bodies go with it.
Something red in his face
when he thinks of telling
his vegetarian wife, her hard face frosting pink
like the frozen beef discs we see
at the drive-thru window.

He talks about Vietnam, opium,
the organics of LA
he’s left for the Midwest,
where animals become us.
I tell about butchering,
the dead eyes,
the grinding body parts.
It’s what beasts do—
thinning
when they cannot eat each other.
We want to taste what keeps us here.
The scent of flesh
gets in, but the brake lights flare.
And the sharp fall air,
the exhaust we’ve ignored
slips through. It’s not summer

anymore. We argue over who pays.
We drive back. He sits at his desk,
and I sit at mine, and fluorescent lights
glare at each of us chewing,
checking what reflects
in the foil wrappers,
the grease shining on our fingers,
residue of what we’ve
done.

Donna Biffar's Kiss Me Cold (ISBN 0-9748468-3-X) is available from Cherry Pie Press. Email cherrypiepress@yahoo.com for an order form or a list of previous chapbooks in the series.

Click here for a flyer and order form for Kiss Me Cold. Click here for a press release.

Donna Biffar also has chapbooks available through another local press, Snark. Check those out too.