Houston, Texas – September 7, 2024 – Press Release:
Saint Julian Press is proud to announce that Laura Smyth’s new book of poetry, Fox Dreams, will be published on November 8, 2024. In Fox Dreams, Laura Smyth invites readers on a poetic journey that sharpens perception and deepens understanding of the natural world and human experience. With precise and lyrical language, Smyth confronts deeply human themes of loss, grief, aging, and the complexities of parenthood against the untamed backdrop of nature. She artfully balances what is often unseen or ignored—homelessness, dementia, the forgotten and forsaken—against the luminous details that make existence vibrant and immediate.
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Read Fox Dreams and your vision will sharpen page by page, as the speaker’s does in “Imagined Darkness,” where “a blue jay insists I witness / all the bits and pieces of this life.” The exquisite beauty of those bits and pieces lies in the moment in which they are witnessed; an instant of ordinary ecstasy as in “Imagined Darkness”: “Your soul is a filament / vibrating inside a bulb...” Fox Dreams reveals the partner of beauty as insight. Epiphanies rise like stones in a fast creek. “It is not for me to decide / Every little whim of the sky,” the speaker tells us in “In Praise of Porches.” “Exhaustion brings the rain / I know that much.” Read Fox Dreams and intuitional lyricism will free you into knowing, you know more than you thought.
—Lynn McGee
Tracks, Sober Cooking, Heirloom Bulldog, Bonanza, and Science Says Yes |
Human agency and emotion drift through the marveling world of Laura Smyth’s collection of poems, Fox Dreams. Birds argue; a woodchuck is surprised; rivers are “less determined,” the full moon can “step behind a cloud,” irises “search” for what they lack. These poems are portals to the natural world, microscopes and telescopes, invitations to take walks with her along shorelines of seaglass, “bubbling” beneath your feet, to visit the halls of extinction and meet the dodo, and the zoo and consider the escape plans of servals. In a world in which artificial intelligence laps at our feet ever closer and the very fact of existence seems tentative and endangered, Smyth reminds us of swirls of light bending toward us, the presence of both nature and God, the “small bouquets of cold and light and shadow.” This is a collection determined to remind us of both the smallest and most sentient details of existence, as well as the brilliant circumstances that make us alive.
—Elizabeth Cohen
Bird Light and The Patron Saint of Cauliflower
Bird Light and The Patron Saint of Cauliflower
Laura Smyth’s fiercely intelligent collection thrums with dreams and visions of the natural world. Creatures of air, land, and water, fields, sunlight, stars, even chemical combustions are revealed by a speaker keenly attuned to Nature and its shadows as well as her own complex humanity. In concise lyrical language Smyth plumbs loss and grief, parenting, danger and safety, aging, regret and other deeply human concerns against a backdrop of the untamed world— the “unscheduled joy” of blue jays, a wind that “turns its body / slowly clockwise / in its own time”—and what we can take from this juxtaposition is at the heart of the collection. Combining a scrupulous awareness of what’s often unseen or ignored—a homeless man, a child’s drawing, a woman with dementia, servals in a zoo— with an equally unflinching investigation of human nature, Smyth’s poems enable us to stop and pay attention, to examine our lives including the distances we maintain and the ones we attempt, and sometimes fail, to cross. Memories and ephemeral moments are captured and held by Smyth’s lucid verse as a “bubble is trapped in glass.” FOX DREAMS is a clear lens through which we can view our imperfect humanity, both its limitations and the possibilities within.
—Jennifer O’Grady
White, and Exclusions & Limitations
White, and Exclusions & Limitations
Ms. Smyth is an astute observer of nature. And when in this lovely collection of poems she trains her vision on the human soul, the crackling insight always comes, leaving in its wake a satisfying and profound silence.
—Michael Urheber
Bava’s Gift: Awakening to the Impossible
& the musical, The Further Shores of Knowing
Bava’s Gift: Awakening to the Impossible
& the musical, The Further Shores of Knowing
Laura Smyth is a writer, teacher, and book designer (smythtypedesign.com). She holds an MFA degree from Columbia University and spent many years living and working in the New York metropolitan area before moving to the Keweenaw Peninsula of Upper Michigan. Her poetry, which has been published in print and online journals as well as anthologies, is inspired most by the intersection of human nature and the natural world.
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Fox Dreams
Publication Date: November 8, 2024 Paperback: $18.00 Publisher: Saint Julian Press, Inc. Language: English Paperback: 98 Pages ISBN-13: 978-1-955194-31- |
For an advance copy PDF, contact: Ron Starbuck or Laura Smyth.
Download the Press Release
| fox-dreams-press-release-v1.0.pdf |
Available Through – Bookshop.org ~ 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
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. © 2022
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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.