Poetry | Black Wolf Books

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Composed in the spirit of Mountain & River verse from medieval China, these epigrams turn on precise images of the wild while tracing a path of a more primal self:

At night, you see shadows that do

and don't exist. This one

looms at the edge of camp,

drifting in the woods.

Influenced by Rexroth and Snyder, but described best by Ovid: "there is something animal in the earth.

In Coyote, the natural world becomes emblematic of the human heart, demonstrating how the world around us also shapes the world within.

This thunderhead,

black in the sky,

paints itself into the shape of

a coyote, ears alert,

jaws snarled wide;

and out of its throat

shines a golden shaft of light,

howling in my heart.

These poems of longing and despair, death and rebirth, manage a path of discovery from what can be gained from loss and separation.

The end does not come as pretty or planned,

nor colored flowers we cannot see,

for they're ostensibly for us but naturally

for those who cannot breathe.

"These are lovely. And painful. And carthartic."

--Sheri Keasler-Benson

"I find myself stopping to remember bits of my own painful past, and sometimes I must stop because I can't read through tears." --Susan DePree

Rooted in a tradition perfected by the Japanese, these are poems of love gone wrong, yet also the most tender endearment.

First winter, then summer,

and in the long spring between,

you move as only music moves,

all about the air--

This voice is "intimate and quiet."--John Balaban

Clear yet complex in their simplicity, with allusions as diverse as Homer, Li Bai, and native American myth, these poems ponder the unsolved problem of light and darkness in the human soul.

Imagine, beneath the snow,

green land everywhere.

"Tender-sweet as lullabies, hard-etched as crystal."

--Debra Magpie Earling

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Forming a poetic mosaic from Spain, these poems weave in and out of the ghosts of Lorca and Hemingway, a land of lovers and betrayal, and the garden with a well from which no one can drink.

And I hear, as if from a distance,

the bottom of my shoes

clicking stones in the street,

her whisper yet here,

even still.

"Reflective, sensitive, and musical."

--Kaye Bache-Snyder

By tracing the seasons from the stars above and the many phases of the moon, these poems discover the mystery of life, where others find none.

I follow this line of light, this

curtain of dark, night also day,

and know so little at all.

"These pages swing wide. Why not say the poems soar?--Veronica Patterson

In the depths of winter, when the hope of spring rises and sprouts, we come to sense all the little things by which we worry ourselves through yesterday, today, and tomorrow. As these poems show:

Days close to their winter origins

then open again, not like a flower

but a door, a cloud leaving the sky.

A poetic journal from Costa Rica, Pura Vida is just as it claims: "Pure Life." With echoes of Catullus, plus the fusion of Latin culture with native America, these poems resonate from a gritty urban ghetto to the divinity of the rain forest, blending spiritual elements and passion with unflinching reality.

Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me,

a thousand-hundred times,

and I will climb in clouds to

the top of that volcano

we both can't see.