Deborah L. Fruchey

An exploration of the Burning Man of 2020, which was not sanctioned and almost didn't happen at all, by the man Richard Loranger calls our own Bay Area "Psychedelic Nature poet".

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A 450 page blockbuster, this is Steve Arntson's exploration and description of a journey to something that almost didn't happen at all: the Burning Man festival of 2020. Only a few hardy souls came to the playa that year. Travel with Steve through the red fires of that endless summer, that made West indistinguishable from East. Make your way up to Oregon, and climb Steens Mountain. Meet the Stockton cop who spawned the name, his own name never to be known. Rusticate in New Pine Creek, where Steve fantasizes the retreat of a person who feels threatened and lurks in junk shops to obscure his identity. Ride behind the ponies of Adel, clamber through the wilderness wondering if you remember what to do if you hit quicksand. And at last, meet Laura, the Gate, at the opening to the playa where no one is supposed to be at all, but, irresistibly, comes.

An exploratiion of Love, Nature, Dreams, and Longing by the sixth poet laureate of Benicia, California. Johanna has been widely published and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. AVAILABLE NOW! BUY ON AMAZON

"This collection by Johanna Ely is an invitation into our natural world and all its delicacies. This book speaks to the 'soft dark earth' and the 'calligraphy of winter.'  There are vital questions in these pages. The poet asks us 'What if one day the trees in our town uprooted themselves?' And in these questions, there are journeys worth exploring. The poems in these pages resonate and in them you will find old fence lines, Japanese maples, origami flowers, a silver necklace missing a clasp, and a letter to Frida Kahlo. These poems will make backroads and bridges into your psyche. You will find 'a small sturdy boat' and will feel compelled and delighted to 'climb on board, without a map'.”

—Connie Post, Author of Prime Meridian and Between Twilight

The Worlds According to Loki, reissued at last in Print-On-Demand format! Now everyone who wants a copy can get this Vampyre Mike classic again!

Made possible by the generosity & support of Jane Kassel Haver, Mike's sister; Jack Edwards, who beautifully reproduced the entire text, Pasha De Saix, Mike's muse & cover artist, and Last Laugh Productions. Buy it here

“Rudy Jon Tanner’s poetry is a wonderful exploration not only of his thoughts but, more importantly, of the sounds of his thoughts as they go dancing by in that mirror, the written page. He is as much a musician as a poet and, while he has ‘things’ to ‘say,’ the delight is more in the ‘saying’ than in the ‘things’: ‘we break into that comma shaped trophy horse neck smooth in the curve.’ Only a poet with a deep training in music would be likely to write a line like ‘all that bone and flesh in the sea pitted against siren deep from his own belly, didn’t eat.’ Though deliberately and carefully ‘accessible,’ Tanner’s work is simultaneously beautiful and expansive and tells us that a poem is no more the vehicle of its ‘ideas’ than a piano is a piece of furniture. His language is the sound of spirit as it nudges its often-complex musings into the ecstatic expectations of a consciousness that is always elevated, brilliantly tuned, and turned towards ‘the sounds of above.’ It is all in tempo rubato: ‘between the darkly limned blossoms boldly circumscribed.’ It is a poets’ poetry that always remembers that people must be carefully seduced into a condition of joy.”

—Jack Foley, KPFA Radio host & author of A California Beat Literary Timeline (The Beat  
    Scene Press, England, 2014)

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"Steve Arntson’s delightful sonnets defy formality. Read them all and as you do merge into Diane Lee Moomey's moody mystical watercolors. His sonnets encourage your inquiries, 'to safely say the rest of what becomes,' hinting there are many nuances to perspective, and lines.  Be enchanted; take flights of fancy."

       — Mary-Marcia Casoly, author of Run To Tenderness, Lost Pages of Bird Lore

"Arntson writes like a time traveller who’s met up with an Elizabethan sonneteer.  He mixes stark insights from our tragically fractured world with meditations on its beauty, archaic diction with modern humor, and occasional slang— all written in rhymed, strictly measured iambic pentameter.  It’s as if he’s learned to speak sonnet.

"And Moomey’s paintings are serenely wonderful.  If you’re looking for a book that appeals to all of your senses —and maybe even some you didn’t know you had— this is it. "

        —Charlotte Muse, author of In Which I Forgive the River

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"Jan Dederick demonstrates through her mature and satisfying poetry, in language lyric and logical, her ability to say the unsayable, to exist and yet remain unsaid, in fresh, literary ways.  For instance, she draws the reader in by being deadly serious and funny at the same time. Her humor tempers the profound as in the poem “Leave it Alone” where she repeats the line “I never had a foreskin but I had a son” and shocks the reader from smile to surprise and back again.

"This impactful collection begs to be read again and again, befitting the behemoth task of investigating the wonder and mystery of the physical and energetic body, and understanding more each time."

— Eileen Malone, Founder/Director, The Soul-Making Keats Competition