The Years That Went Missing

The Years That Went Missing

Susan Antolin

In The Years That Went Missing, Susan Antolin digs deeply into herself and her experience to carry readers through life’s seasons. Each poem contributes its own narrative tension as the book explores an undercurrent of medical and personal challenges — years that seemingly interrupted a professional career.

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Winner of the Backbone Press Haiku Chapbook Contest

The poems are consistently engaging while being honest and forthright, reaching, at last, for a reset button. We may be relieved to be done with the missing years, but value them also.

This One Life

Renée Owen

In This One Life, Renée Owen offers four courses of poems that mark life’s ups and downs. The poet employs a palette of word spices to flavor a sometimes challenging poetic meal, ranging from celebrations of nature to the devastation of the California wild fires—but ending with hope.”

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American Herstory

celeste doaks

A collection of brilliant poems that speak to and about former First Lady Michelle Obama. Spanning themes of family, art, gardening, and race, they are as lighthearted as they are heavy. American Herstory is the winner of the inaugural Backbone Press Chapbook Award.

ISBN #978-0-9994659-6-7
$9.00
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Between the Shadow & The Soul

Mariam Gomaa

Gomaa’s first chapbook of poetry is elegant yet visceral, a quiet punch. It serves as a map to define womanhood, precisely Muslim womanhood.

ISBN: 978-0-9994659-4-3
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Present Values

José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes

To confront the moral errors of what is perceived honestly, but is also beloved, respected, and deservedly admired! Present Values is a brave book, as well as an intelligent and beautiful one. I suspect that few people could have written it.

ISBN: 978-0-9994659-3-6
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Mother Said, I Want Your Pain

Naoko Fujimoto

In Naoko Fujimoto’s “Mother Said, I Want Your Pain”, there are rooms without doors nor windows. Time becomes ecstatic and intimate. The reader walks into these rooms allured by the unadorned but skillful language, the spectral beauty of the imagery and the haunting narrative of emptiness.

ISBN: 978-0-9915514-9-1
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The Riddle of Longing

Faisal Mohyuddin

In form and free verse, Faisal Mohyuddin delivers truth on behalf of the displaced. In The Riddle of Longing polished and powerfully controlled poems make you want to scream in frustration at the unjust world, but they also enlighten us.

ISBN: 978-0-9994659-0-5
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The Ocean Between Us

Beatriz Fernandez

Beatriz Fernandez artfully weaves together dazzling imagery and alluring sounds to create concrete visions of Puerto Rico, Florida, and a geography of loss. With the ability to use the perfect words to describe imperfect times, she poses questions that pierce the human spirit.

ISBN: 978-0-9994659-1-2
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Drapetomania

Cynthia Parker-Ohene

Like a traditional griot, Cynthia Parker-Ohene creates a world of wonder(ment). “Core Black Lives” are depicted in striking images that highlight places and pieces of history. The poems in Drapetomania are composed of a lush, crisp language that allows the reader to inhabit lands where “sons will not be stopped by 5 0” and where “dna leaches into birchbark.” Raw and polished, truth and sardonic, these poems unabashedly shine “in the stubborn light.”

ISBN: 978-0-9915514-9-1
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$4.00

Memory of a Girl

Aozora Brockman

In Memory of a Girl, memory loss is magnified through narrative poems wrought with intimate, familial Japanese terms & cultural customs. There’s the anguish of witnessing and caring for someone losing memories, but along with despair and frustration, Brockman extols the grace, bond, and strength that lingers through debilitation. She is an elegant storyteller.

ISBN: 978-0-9915514-7-7
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Strange-tongued Names

Aaron Counts

With big guts Counts writes poems that are vivid—the language, sometimes a distinct mixture of empathy and gore. On subjects of hip-hop influence, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and his sparse Central District “Love Story” postcard poems, he is resolute in his depictions and accounts of dearth and inner-city blues. Strange-tongued Names represents an eloquent reflection on urban life.

ISBN: 978-0-9915514-8-4
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7 x 7 kwansabas

Tara Betts

7×7 kwansabas brims with flashes of imagery. Words slam into each other as if in a race against time to define the characters she embodies her poems with. She primes her pen, revealing intricate details into the lives of the famous. The likes of Katherine Dunham, Tupac Shakur, Michael Jackson, and Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan rise up on the page, allowing the reader to discover and rediscover them.

ISBN: 978-0-9915514-4-6
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Laundry

C.P. Mangel

Laundry is a stunning poetry chapbook, filled with memorable characters and tons of artful turns of phrases. The narrative language never stops short or becomes laborious to read. Mangel has chosen a difficult subject matter to explore––prison life, and in particular, she deftly delves into the nature of hate crime within the prison system she imagines. She does so with aplomb, never resorting to cliché.

ISBN: 978-0-9915514-5-3
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In the Land of Tropical Martyrs

Dariel Suarez

Though In the Land of Tropical Martyrs is a chapbook, it has the heft and authority of a full volume of poetry. Each of these poems is rich with the ache of urgent memory, living memory, memory that sings as the opposite of nostalgia and wakes us more fully to our own lives. ~Michael Hettich, author of Systems of Vanishing and The Animals Beyond Us

ISBN: 978-0-9915514-3-9
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$4.00

Sea Island Blues

Tyree Daye

…Daye writes of his home in the south, his family, his loves and losses, all with a grace and accuracy of image and language. Daye sings of hurricanes and hydrangeas, pond fishing, sun tea and the North Star, “that doesn’t lead to freedom anymore/ but you can follow it and still get killed.” ~Dorianne Laux, author of Facts About the Moon and The Book of Men

ISBN: 978-0-9915514-2-2
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Trace Particles

Allison Joseph

…poems that are both smart and sensitive, Joseph sings of America’s promises, those broken, those kept, and
those just recently made. These are the poems of America’s heartland and America’s heart. ~Gerry LaFemina, author of Notes for the Novice Ventriloquist.

ISBN: 978-0-9915514-1-5
OUT OF PRINT
E-Version available via PayPal
$4.00