Taking Flight in 2020 . . .
Now Come Hyacinths – Janet Joyner (late summer 2020)
Slip – Jenny Bates (late summer 2020)
Fall/Winter 2020
Armature – Melinda Thomsen
Showing Face – Nancy Dew Taylor
The Scattering of Saints – David Dixon
The 2020 Hermit Feathers Review
Sally Atkins/ Ritual, Song of the Shamaness
Dorothy Baird/ Dust, driving my son to college
Joan Barasovska/ St. James Street, Lullaby
Sam Barbee/ DDT, 21st Street Chorale, Inquiry
Jenny Bates/ lowercase, Ovid’s Last Page, Wind of Twilight
(and Essay of Remembrance – Margaret Hillert)
Steve Cushman/ Washing Dishes, Super Glue, Work, Baseball Glove
David Dixon/ Mosquito Net, Counting Coup
Ralph Earle/ When Bees Were Glad, Betty Helps Out
Michael Gaspeny/A Dream of Three Lonely Hunters, A Tippling Plutocrat to His Peers at the Planters’ Club, When You Asked To Borrow My Mower
John Haugh/ My first horse/ my last dog, Blue-Purple Crayon
Janet Joyner/ Colony Collapse, Annunciation Rap, Cook’s Feet, Ode to the
Great White Egret
Pat Riviere-Seel/ Astonished, A Defense of Sentimentality, Reflections, Lament
Dee Stribling/ Awaken, Well Water, Tires
Nancy Dew Taylor/ How Belle Saved My Life A Hundred Times, time 22, Pyres August, 1955, The Visitation 2004.
Melinda Thomsen/ Whirligig Park in Wilson, NC, Typewriters, Stir and Carry On
(and Essay of Remembrance – William Matthews)
Donna Love Wallace/ still white sheet of paper, Alternatives
(and Essay of Remembrance – Wislawa Szymborska)
Kirstie L. Williams/ In Another Life Molly Woods, Embracing Gilead, Insomnia
Katherine Wolfe/ Bridges to the Sea, Homecoming at Hollywood Presbyterian,
Later Years
Nancy Womack/ Defining Blue, Travel: A Divertimento, The Same Again but Different
2021
Red Jacket Requiem(2020 HFP Chapbook Selection) – Nancy Womack
Torn Screen Bent Frame – Dee Stribling
(Past Publications)
Visitations (summer 2019)
If your soul is on a quest to balance the myriad minutia of life in the 21st century, then poet Jenny Bates’ third collection, Visitations, is a must read. Bates’ answers lie in the forest surrounding her home where by night the master vocals of the Barred Owl always call her to a portal of growth. By day, the Red Shouldered Hawk beckons to complete the summons, “Observe.” Whether plant or animal, wild or domesticated, Bates’ communion with all that is not human, leads to a forgotten realm of holistic knowledge. Through the pages of this idiomatic, metaphysical collection, a gentle relationship between the mirror selves of naturalism and fantasy charm the unfeigned reader.
Jenny Bates, born and raised in Michigan, resides as poet in the foothills of North Carolina. She is a member of Winston-Salem Writers and NC Poetry Society. She has two published books, Opening Doors: an equilog of poetry about Donkeys (Lulu Publishing, Raleigh, NC) and Coyote with Coffee, a single poem fine craft volume (Catbird on the Yadkin Press, Tobaccoville, NC). Both books reside in the collections of Libraries and Universities (Vanderbilt and the University of Vermont) in the United States and England. Her work has also been published in Flying South, Winston-Salem Writers premier literary work. She is a consecutive contributing poet in the Winston-Salem Writers series Poetry in Plain Sight and in 2017 she was a top 10 Finalist in the Press 53 Single Poem Contest.
WAHEE NECK (summer 2019)
Every child is a hapless carrier of the epic reverberating within family generations. The boundaries of childhood become mutable, conflating the overheard with the lived, the past with the present. WAHEE NECK, Janet Joyner’s newest collection, moves like consciousness itself; outward from the individual, to the tribe, the species, and their habitats. Hers is a distinctly southern voice. And in this, her third volume, the poet guides the reader from the leaky borders of childhood toward an invasion of human and global disruptions. In her final section, Joyner contemplates the horrible possibility of annihilation of the planet. Throughout WAHEE NECK, Janet Joyner’s lyrical language challenges set patterns of sound displayed in poems of both free and more formal verse; in selections short and pithy, as well as those more lengthy and narrative.
A must read for the discerning.
Janet Joyner is a native of South Carolina’s Pee Dee region and belongs, perhaps, to the last generation before mechanized farming, a time when the work songs of harvesting tobacco were richly vowelled by the Gullah and GeeChee women who did the work. In the fields. In the kitchens. In the nurseries. Her poetry sings with these cadences. Her themes, still rooted deeply to the land, its seasons, its creatures, ring with more modern and wider dichotomies which a life-time of studying and teaching French literature has enriched.
Between The Stones (fall 2019)
Donna Love Wallace’s debut poetry chapbook, Between Stones, takes the reader on a journey 1 in 8 women will experience sometime during their life: invasive breast cancer. With candor and a full range of emotion, Wallace navigates her way through disparate places and the people that occupy them: the biopsy suite, the grocery store, her closet and a tattoo parlor 350 miles from home. With sparse eloquence and artisanal attention to her craft, Donna Love Wallace is a poet’s poet. Readers of Between The Stones will cry, laugh and celebrate a voice that chooses stoic analysis over panic; positivity in the face of pain and uncertainty; and resolute courage over defeat. Whether or not invasive breast cancer has touched your life, great inspiration lines these pages.
Donna Love Wallace of Lewisville, North Carolina, received a Wildacres Artist Residency to complete her first book of poetry titled Between the Stones, about her personal experience with breast cancer. Donna has served in leadership with Winston Salem Writers and Poetry in Plain Sight. Her poetry appears in Snapdragon, Hermit Feathers Review, Flying South, Kakalak, The Paddock Review, Wild Goose Poetry Review, Plainsongs and WestWard Quarterly, among others. Donna is a retired critical care nurse and seminarian, and recently learned how to brew a lovely cup of coffee out in the middle of nowhere.
Hermit Feathers Review (November 2019)
Hermit Feathers Press is pleased to announce the 2019 contributors’ list for Hermit Feathers Review:
Michael Gaspeny John Haugh
Emily Herring Wilson Joan Barasovska
Betty Rodgers Jenny Bates
Sam Barbee Jeanne Julian
Peter Venable Janis Harrington
Priscilla Webster-Williams Grace Ellis
Paul Jones Dorothy Baird
Donna Wallace Charles Wheeler
Beverly Johnston (posthumously)
