SLAPERING HOL PRESS
chapbooks & anthologies

SHP Publications

The 2011 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition Winner!

"The haunting poems in Driving Montana, Alone are in physical and spiritual motion ."
     —Connie Wanek

"Phillips offers her readers a series of gritty, pastoral, elegiac poems. Her radiantly distilled meditations are uncompromising, direct, and beautiful."
     —Denise Duhamel

"In these small but precise gems, Helen Barolini captures the magic and majesty of an inspirational river. Her language carries us from a purple dawn over the Palisades through a foggy morning to a shadowy twilight. We encounter tugboats, swooping hawks, ice flows, and the mirrored Tappan Zee Bridge. Take this volume with you to the Hudson and see it with a poet's eyes."
     —Christine Lehner

"Lynn Wagner's poems deftly honor our unruly impulses. She has a marvelous ear for the rhythmic urgencies of the American tounge and a wicked wit. No word goes unnoticed on her shrewd yet passionate watch."
     —Baron Wormser

"Liz Ahl brings a naturalist's close observation and a metaphysician's wry wit to poems about our lived experiences in the natural/physicial world."
     —Robin Becker

"When Alexander and Stefanon scrutinize the variegated surfaces of Romare Bearden’s art, the intensity of their gazes gives way to speech. In the blues of “Reclining Nude,” Stefanon’s speaker discovers “I could hear / her holding / her breath.” Alexander finds images that transmute into sounds: “Flowered dresses. / A woman’s holler. River or guitar.” In the hands of these poets, ekphrasis is an act of inquiry, a mode of poetic transformation as well as cultural analysis. For both, the lacunae inherent in acts of reading and looking are openings for empathy, uncertainty, discourse."
     —Barbara Fischer

"Stephanie Lenox's The Heart That Lies Outside the Body mines the Guinness World Records to take metaphor to a sublime extreme. Her chapbook, peopled with its 'federation of freaks' is euphoric, generous, gracefully obsessive. There is intense personal depth in all of these poems, which are intimate, skillful, shimmering with complexity and awe."
     —Denise Duhamel

"Painting and poetry have been twinned since antiquity, but seldom so eloquently as in Mary Kaiser's collection, Falling into Velázquez. Poem after poem pulls us into a work of art - some famous, some not - and then out into our own lives again...Mary Kaiser's luminous first collection delights from beginning to end."
     —Peter Meinke

"There's something radiantly deep in the poems of Sean Nevin. omething luminous and haunting, familiar yet magnetically charged, potently mysterious...Nevin's poems lead us to the powerful contemplative edge of thinking and seeing that we need. I trust him."
     —Naomi Shihab Nye

"Nancy Taylor Everett has a flair for fresh language and a fine ear for the music of words. Everett's Juliet is a person we want to know better, someone whose life we'd like to follow."
     —Susan Terris

"The poems in Days When Nothing Happens enact a dialectic between commotion and calm, work and idleness, and manage to enlarge the meaning of both realms in the process. Both are presented with a remarkable vividness, with fresh, homely detail, in a voice that is richly nuanced and with an inventiveness that makes each poem surprising."
     —Carl Dennis

"The poems of Brighde Mullins have been maturing during their twenty years of composition. The thirteen included in thi small book are all of them poignant, eloquent and revelatory of an authentic gift."
     —Harold Bloom

"By recalling with celebratory joy the vigor, the messiness, the courage of life as it was once lived in a terrible time by the mathematician at the Scottish Café in Lvov, these poems do us a very great service."
     —Charles Martin

"The poems in Jianqing Zheng's The Landscape of Mind are often quick movements of light and touch and tone. Like 'two boats' shadows / overlapping, lives and images rub up against each other and leave their marks. Some moments are quietly erased. The world talks back."
     —Michael Burkard

"Freight's poems spring up spare and clear, out of the thickness of experience. They trust the energy of each truly perceived moment to be radient and poignant."
     —Marie Ponsot

"Tempered by science and philosophy, the poems are modest in the claims they make, and strangely, all the more magical for what they reveal about survival in the world as it is."
     —Timothy Liu

"There's an edge to these poems, a sly, sardonic edge that lays bare the tricky changes of a world filled with campaign slogans and dissembling politicians."
     —Allison Joseph

"Her incandescent collection explores a world of terrifying contingency, through the focus of breast cancer."
     —D. Nurkse

"...a collection of poems which lives up to its title - a rich vein mined by an oberver-poet as intelligent as she is wonderful."
     —Carole Simmons Oles

"On the page, the poems are lean and plainly spoken, but they are alive with surprises and bright maneuvers. The result is a fine combination of deftness of craft and ease of expression."
     —Billy Collins

"Pearl Karrer is a poet who makes connections, whose sense of life is deeply metaphoric. It has been a joy for me to come across her manuscript."
     —Denise Levertov

"Dina Ben-Lev has a fine ear for lyric phrasing, a virtue all the more singular for the way her poems bear down on difficult subjects."
     —Brooks Haxton

"These fine poems are about family, which is to say they are about everything: love, hate, birth, disease, heartbreak, and forgiveness. Poets known and unknown have contributed to this consistently moving collection, a powerful book that speaks eloquently to our deepest concerns."
     —Peter Meinke

"The poems in this anthology are testimony to...a force in nature that is at once source and companion, theme and consolation."
     —John Haines

"[These] poems...have in common clarity, accessibility, and vigor."
     — Maxine Kumin