Houston, Texas – September1, 2021 – Press Release:
Saint Julian Press is proud to publish a new book of poetry. BONE SKID, BONE BEAUTY, by poet Jane Creighton, was officially released on September 1, 2021. Using an intensely lyrical focus on the elemental qualities of language, Bone Skid, Bone Beauty ranges across a world striated with the mysteries of loss, even as that world is edged and brightened by the persistence of our love for it.
Saint Julian Press is proud to publish a new book of poetry. BONE SKID, BONE BEAUTY, by poet Jane Creighton, was officially released on September 1, 2021. Using an intensely lyrical focus on the elemental qualities of language, Bone Skid, Bone Beauty ranges across a world striated with the mysteries of loss, even as that world is edged and brightened by the persistence of our love for it.
|
In Bone Skid, Bone Beauty, Jane Creighton gives us the marvels of poetry as it moves between dreams and memories, salt and mist. Reading her renews our claim on the beautiful nature of those elemental tools an artist uses to shape meaning with words. And what meaning she makes: exhilarating and devastating. I am reminded of Virginia Woolf’s phrase in the opening lines of Mrs. Dalloway: “what a lark, what a plunge.” Great pleasure can be found in the cadences and musicality of Creighton’s lines, in the perfect fit of idea and image; also, there is great surprise and pain in being taken down into the intimacies of grief. This work is motivated overall by what the unsettling presence of the dead signifies for the living. In this time of plague and incalculable loss, Creighton’s poems offer necessary guidance for nurturing the ghosts of 2020 and cultivating the gardens of 2021. So many memorable and quotable lines, I leave you with one, a description of poetry itself: “The door unlocks itself and opens / Into a field crusted with the spiny tips / of words.”
—Kay Turner, author of Beautiful Necessity:
The Art and Meaning of Women's Altars, and What a Witch: The Wise Woman in Folklore, History, and Performance |
To read Jane Creighton’s poems is to be held, gratefully, in what she calls “the glinty vise of memory.” We slide with her in and out of dreams, walk the ragged edge of old loss and fresh, vivid connection with the natural world and a touching variety of people, some known, some strangers. Bone Skid, Bone Beauty (starting with its magical title) is intense and beautifully wrought, its reach wide and deep. It’s only a shame that it’s taken so long to be given to us.
—Rosellen Brown, author of The Lake on Fire
Cora Fry’s Pillow Book, Half a Heart, and Before and After
Cora Fry’s Pillow Book, Half a Heart, and Before and After
It takes a certain patience, the will to endure, to make language sharp enough to slice through time. Jane Creighton’s Bone Skid, Bone Beauty patiently observes a world surrendering the past to an ever- mobile “now.” There, Lot’s Wife and Orpheus serve not as figures of regret but as gatherers of wisdom in crisis, who “Salt the wet horizon / with thimbles full of stories: / what we did, where we went, / what we want back, even as / the city burns.” Nowhere is this mediation on the persistence of place and the ghosts of memory more powerfully jagged than in the sonnet crown “Weight and Measure.” There Creighton unveils the past full of “blurred figures piloting a floating mist,” a past where “So many stories / flicker at the edge, / softening the quick blow, / the regret.” Bone Skid, Bone Beauty musters the will to see the world as it is without fashionable malaise or facile hope and to reside in a radiant now, where it is “as if / we had all, always been friends / who loved one another / in the same place, at the same time.” Bones Skid, Bone Beauty lives at that very place and time.
—Joseph Campana, author of
The Book of Life, The Book of Faces, and Natural Selection
The Book of Life, The Book of Faces, and Natural Selection
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jane Creighton is a poet, essayist, and Professor of English at the University of Houston—Downtown, where she teaches literature and creative writing. A recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, she taught American literature for a year at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. In the decades prior to her university teaching, her social activism included holding organizing positions with the National Lawyers Guild and the Center for Constitutional Rights. In the 1970s, she edited and published an independent poetry magazine, Sailing the Road Clear, and in subsequent years taught writing in public schools for the Texas Commission on the Arts, Teachers & Writers Collaborative, and Writers in the Schools. In 1987, she served as literary curator for the Washington Project on the Arts exhibition, War and Memory in the Aftermath of Vietnam. Originally from the northeast, she has lived in Houston since 1988.
|
|
|
|
Publication Date: September 1, 2021
Paperback: $18.00 ISBN-13: 978-1-955194-00-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2021936728 Number of pages: 120 Publisher: Saint Julian Press, Inc. To receive an advance book copy for a book review by email, please contact: Ron Starbuck or Jane Creighton. |
PRESS RELEASE PDF
| |||
Available Through ~ Ingram Content Group ~ Amazon ~ Barnes & Noble ~ IndieBound ~ Fine Book Distributors & Retailers
Saint Julian Press, Inc. * Houston, TX 77008 * Ron Starbuck ~ Publisher-CEO
Email: ronstarbuck@saintjulianpress.com * Web: www.saintjulianpress.com
Saint Julian Press, Inc. * Houston, TX 77008 * Ron Starbuck ~ Publisher-CEO
Email: ronstarbuck@saintjulianpress.com * Web: www.saintjulianpress.com
SAINT JULIAN PRESS, INC. © 2022
|
|
|
|
Web Hosting by IPOWER
|
|
|
Some pages may include Amazon Associates Program Links for Saint Julian Press, Inc.
As an Amazon Associate — Saint Julian Press, Inc. may earn funds from any qualifying purchases.
This arrangement does help to sustain the press and allow us to publish more books by more authors.
As an Amazon Associate — Saint Julian Press, Inc. may earn funds from any qualifying purchases.
This arrangement does help to sustain the press and allow us to publish more books by more authors.