Posts

flock of birds

Terri Cohlene’s A CONSPIRACY OF BLACKBIRDS

/0 Comments/in /by

A CONSPIRACY OF BLACKBIRDS, Terri Cohlene, MoonPath Press 2026.

I want to describe Terri Cohlene’s long overdue debut poetry collection, A Conspiracy of Blackbirds, as a hodge-podge, but only if you understand hodge-podge as that strange little store crammed with ancient washing machines, pitchforks, maybe a statue of Cupid or a wrought iron hen with her clutch of chicks, maybe a bag full of unexpected gems. In this collection of poems, you never know what you’ll find, and you’re sure to find exactly what you need.

Cohlene’s subjects include old photographs, old work boots, mothers, daughters, MS, bronzed baby shoes from decades back, lost checkbooks…I could go on. As Patrick Dixon describes it: A Conspiracy of Blackbirds is “a book of surprises.” Somehow—how does she do it?—it all comes together, even the hard stuff transforming into occasions for delight. In “Finally, I Become What You Always Wanted,” addressed to the poet’s mother, we find these instructions: “Cut me open, / count the rings.” One expects such a poem to end with scars, instead—apple blossoms.

Remind me to make a copy of “On the Table” for my massage therapist. It’s a list of all the places old hurts have secreted themselves (an ex-husband, a third-grade teacher, a bully…), and ends:

Then there’s my estranged
mother, lodged like a lizard
around my sternum—
a reminder of why bones
are needed to protect the heart.

On the back cover, poet Sandra Yannone offers the perfect precis: “A Conspiracy of Blackbirds chronicles how one woman breaks free from a multi-generational cycle of abandonments to reach for the sky in a transformative murmuration of stunning flight.” Exactly so. Cohlene—an artist, children’s book writer, playwright, and more—offers a a map to the healing and sustaining power of art. These are poems that do not merely show their maker to be surviving, but with her sense of playfulness and capacity for wonder fully alive.

Tailor

If I put my mind to it,
all my poems could fit into a thimble.

They are, after all, merely the alphabet,
randomly stitched together
in repeating patterns.

And if I choose a font
small enough, say .05,
they would probably
slip through the eye
of a needle

with the dangle of trim,
casual embellishment
of button, bead, fringe

waiting there to be discovered
by the occasional
unsuspecting elf.

—Terri Cohlene

Visit Terri Cohlene’s website to learn (much) more, and to purchase her book. You can also find her book at MoonPath Press, and on bookshop.org. 

photo by Bethany Reid

Caitlin Dwyer, IN THE SALT

/0 Comments/in /by

IN THE SALT, Caitlin Dwyer, MoonPath Press, 2026.

Winner of the 2025 Sally Albiso Award

How much more praise can I lavish on this quirky, brilliant collection of poems? The book is woven of two main strands: the female characters of Homer’s Odyssey, and the story of the birth and imperiled early life of Dwyer’s son, Quinn, to whom the book is dedicated. The book is woven of dreams, myths, nightmares, and hope. In a way the book is about weaving, and it is Penelope working at her loom that makes this theme clear. She weaves cloth (unweaving it each night, if you’re unfamiliar), as she fends off suitors, longs for her husband’s return, and watches her son grow up.

Strategies I found effective in making the whole coherent were Penelope’s dream sequences of untitled poems; and the several poems titled “Waste Thread” that are scattered throughout, like wasted threads on the floor under a loom. Some of these are short as two lines, but here’s a longer example:

Waste Thread

Silver-tipped rhododendrons.
Lichen-speckled bark.
I close my eyes and dream of rain, wake
and dream of rain. My eyes blur
when I try to focus. When I gaze out
of my eyes and not my head, I feel alive.
Nose in the wet soil. Songs of worm-trace
and limestone, shell-break, calcium pulver.
Phlox in the cracks. I close my eyes
and sugar-syrup coats my tongue, crystallized
honey cracked against a bad tooth.

—Caitlin Dwyer

Sometimes (often) the lines blur. Is this Penelope, wasting threads, or is this our poet?

Waste Thread

Buddha says we are all capable of waking up.
The human mind is nothing but sky-flowers.
Cataracts, clouds. Perhaps because I value the body
that made him, I cannot see my son clearly;
he dashes this way and that, wet petals, blur.

—Caitlin Dwyer

The final poem, “Song to Call a Body from the Salt,” begins—

Do you recognize the constellations yet?
The bear, the cored apple, the crab? The mother
with her hands full of stars

—and what I notice here is not only the lovely enjambment of the second line into the third, but also an education in progress. A mother, teaching her son about the constellations; a mother, learning to be present with your young son; and the poet, schooling us on her art.

Visit Dwyer’s website to find more poems from the book (including “Changeling,” one of my favorites). You can order a copy from MoonPath Press, or your local independent bookshop.

Neile Graham, THE WALK SHE TAKES

/1 Comment/in /by

THE WALK SHE TAKES, Neile Graham, MoonPath Press, 2019.

This morning I took a walk across Scotland—and across several centuries—with Neile Graham. She reminded me of something I was told when I visited Chartres Catheral: don’t travel as a tourist, but as a pilgrim. “Why did I leave my shore for another?,” Graham asks in “Atlantic Pacific.” This collection of poems answers that question.

In this excerpt, I don’t know if she is referring to the black dog of depression, but that’s how it resonates with me:

I dare the black dog

to rise out of my bones, out of the shadows
to flicker fey at the edge of my vision.

Offer a vision. Mine/yours/another’s.
Driving along the winding coastline,

marking the bends of the sea
as it shapes the land…

The place names create much of the pleasure here: Machrie Moor, Smailholm Tower, Lockerbie, Inchcolm Abbey, Ring of Brodgar, Kilmichael Glassary. And the unapologetic use of Scots, some familiar, some not: kail yard, cruisie, cottar, cairn. But Graham’s own gift for language, for image, for color, makes up the rest. As in this poem:

Kilchurn Castle Picturesque

Rough waters: steel-blue, white-capped
like the clouds above. Low hills raise the sky,
shade up to hunter green, sage green,
then misty mountain blue. A storybook view
across the loch to where Kilchurn nestles at its edge
etched out against the loch like a hill itself.
Closer, and towers define themselves,
windows yaw and gape,
chimneys dagger a path to the sky.

Above the doorway: 1693 and crowns. A shield.
Ropes twined like snakes and Celtic knottery.
We climb and duck. I pose,
surprised in an archway. A fallen turret
the plinth for a statue my now-dead father becomes,
my mother laughing at us, she who now
has forgotten her life. In my camera Kilchurn’s light
sears this instant into history, true beauty:
grey stone and a span of grace.

—Neile Graham

I have a handful of travel poems myself, and have never known how to weave them into the tapestry of a book. Neile Graham has the answer—stay longer, write more. “When a mile-long walk can take you 5000 years” (“Westness Walk: Rousay”), then why not?

Graham is Canadian-born but a long resident of Seattle. I am claiming her as a kindred spirit. Learn more at MoonPath Press or at her website (lots of links to more poetry): https://neilegraham.com.

Priscilla Long, CARTOGRAPHIES OF HOME

/0 Comments/in , /by

CARTOGRAPHIES OF HOME, Priscilla Long, MoonPath Press, 2026.

Cartographies of Home, the latest collection of poems from Priscilla Long, divides the poems and her life into three sections, beginning with her childhood on the Eastern Shore of Maryland: turkey buzzards, garter snakes, molasses milk, honeysuckle.  In the middle section, the poems escort us through college, Viet Nam, Civil Rights, Greyhound bus stations, Viceroy cigarettes, banjo music. In the final section Long embraces old age. Also the author of Dancing with the Muse in Old Age, she does so with authority. She’s packed for this journey, and she knows what to do now that she’s here (write more).

I’ve been immersed in house stuff. First a bathroom remodel, then a leaky roof, stained carpets, a big leak under the kitchen cabinets, a kitchen remodel. (Those are only the highlights.) So of course I gravitated this morning to this poem:

House Bones

My old house. The small muntined window
in a step-up closet. A carpenter measuring,

cogitating, a hundred years ago. Kitchen
windows, cupboards of painted wood, fir

floorboard creaking its unforgetting.
The living-room cove ceiling curves down

to meet its molding. Mantelpiece, tiled
fireplace, the oak floor worn, telling me

I, too, am part of time; party also
to the tree felling, forest-killing

of house-making. I don’t forget stud
and beam, lintel, doorknob, latch,

and knocker. I look out single-hung sash
windows. Architect Louis Kahn said:

The window is a wonderful thing
from which you get the slice of light

that belongs to you and not the sun.
The ladder-back chair, wood-turned stile

and finial, its rush seat—Grandma Henry
owned it, sat in it. I now take my turn.

—Priscilla Long

You may have noticed that yesterday’s post also had a poem with a muntined window. Calling things by their right name is a signature feature in all Long’s writing: muntined, step-up closet, fir floorboard, living-room cove ceiling, beam, lintel, doorknob, latch. Such a pleasure!

If you’re a long-time reader of this blog, then you know I’ve visited Long’s books before. Here’s the link to her website, and a few of my earlier posts as well: Priscilla Long: HOLY MAGIC; The Unsinkable Priscilla Long.

Priscilla Long at Folio, Feb. 2026