Lynne Kemen's More Than a Handful revisits childhood to see things both as a child and as an adult, and to come home and delight in Upstate New York. Kemen “asks unanswerable questions” as her poems illuminate dark family houses and recall childhood being “natural in a body that belongs,” writes poet Lisa Wujnovich. Reviewer Linda Lowen compares the collection to “a spoonful of honey stirred into a cup of tea, swirling the sweet and the bitter into a warming, perfectly-steeped blend.”  After a career in New York City theatre, dance medicine, and biopsychology, Dr. Kemen moved to her family home in Franklin and is on the board of Bright Hill Literary Center.  Visit Lynne at www.lynnekemen.com.

 
     With Caught Before Flight, Vicki Whicker fashions a lyric memoir that takes us on a trip from a stark 60’s childhood to her technicolor adulthood. These poems spring from a strong feminine gaze: edgy, sensual, lyrical and vivid. Poet Jack Grapes writes, “Read these poems as you would inhale oxygen, both before and after you’ve lost your breath reading these feathery poems, each one as profound as a mountain." Memoirist Josh Kilmer-Purcell writes, “Caught Before Flight is overflowing with exquisitely succulent imagery of Whicker’s personal relationships . . . creating residual longing that lingers beyond the final page . . . Rich, mature, and impressively lyrical, these poems demand to be savored.” Whicker left the West Coast and her fashion career to experience and interpret, as poet and fine art photographer, the bucolic life of upstate New York.  Visit Vicki at https://dungabrookdiary.org/publications/.

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David Bachner’s Capital Ironies explores Washington, DC’s monuments and public spaces, its boulevards and side streets, its trails and riverside promenades, to delve into the deeper life of the city, Bachner writes, whose “blatancies, nuances, and contradictions” he has come to know well after forty years of residency. “In a genial voice beset by the anxieties of a fractured nation, Bachner takes us across the intersections of his life and the life of the city, monumental and momentary alike,” writes editor Robert Bensen. Dr. Bachner was dean of Global Studies at Hartwick College and scholar-in-residence at American University's School of International Service.
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Suzanne van Leendert.  We both enjoyed Billy Collins' Poetry Broadcast during the COVID pandemic.  We met after Suzanne put out a call for help in a Facebook Group dedicated to celebrating Billy Collins (The Cool People, The Night People).  She needed a native English speaker to consult with her about translating her work into English.  I said, "I can help. I am an English teacher."  We have been friends ever since.  She is a talented documentary creator and a poet who has also been published in The Non-Conformist and was in the 100 of a very popular and prestigious poetry contest in her home country, The Netherlands.  
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Click on the photo to know more.​

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Robert Bensen, Poet, Teacher, Mentor:

He is the leader of Seeing Things, a poetry workshop run through Bright Hill Press in Treadwell, NY

Robert's newest book is What Lightning Spoke:
Poetry and lightning came for me as a child with the clarity of a calling: “when lightning branched and hooked in myriad brilliances streaming / flooded me with one idea: / in plain air, power makes infinite ways.” Yet they begin invisibly, in silence, slowly building their charge through opposition, until they discharge in forms and figures that “unfold both heaven and earth,” in Shakespeare’s phrase, that blind Milton prayed would “what in me is dark illumine.” Over my lifetime, the revelations of poetry have come from many places: the U.S., Caribbean, Indigenous Americas, Europe, and Arabia. My work invites influence from poets of many races and traditions. Mainly through dramatic monologue, the power of creation speaks as a 12th-Century Japanese princess escaping an assassin, as a 12-year-old girl in Trinidad killed by a car, as Eurydice decorating hell, as the song of the eagle nation calling us to become human beings, and as others charged with perseverance and the grace of human spirit: a half-century of marriage, the girl’s dawning devotion to her art of dance, the elder’s memory being ravaged by Alzheimer’s. They reveal forces deadly and vital: courage after disabling injury, fear following an armed terror attack, greed for a kingdom of gold, and the unbound spirit of the enslaved. Above all, the music of language, the presence of place and history, the intersection of the physical and spiritual, the expression of personhood both human and creaturely; these form the substance of my work.

​Lisa Wujnovich writes poetry at Mountain Dell Farm in Hancock, NY. She is the author of the
chapbooks, Fieldwork, (Finishing Line Press) and This Place Called Us, (Stockport Flats Press).
Her poems have appeared in anthologies like 10: Hobart Festival of Women Writers Tenth
Anniversary Collection (Bushel Collective). Ghost Fishing: (University of Georgia Press),
Seeing Things (Woodlawn Arts Editions). Like Light (Bright Hill Press). Her poems can be read
in Collateral, Calyx, Cento Ceasefire, NOW, The Wide Shore,5A.M., Naugatuck River Review,
High Canary, and FEDCO catalog among others. Follow her on Instagram at mountaindell or
lisawujnovich.