Malinda Seymore

NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: Walk Like the Bird Flies by Susan Ayres On SALE now! Pre-order Price Guarantee: finishinglinepress.com/produ… The prose poems and lyric verses in Walk Like the Bird Flies invite you to explore identity, #history, #nature, #myth, and #art. From Judge Roy Bean to Medea, from Étienne Trouvelot to Princess Di, these poems walk like the bird flies, traveling an emotive journey through love and loss, in imagined and actual landscapes. Susan Ayres is a poet, lawyer, and translator. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in a wide variety of literary and scholarly journals including Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, Sycamore Review, Cimarron Review, The South Carlina Review, and Valparaiso Review. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and teaches at Texas A&M University School of Law in Fort Worth, Texas. Visit psusanayres.com. PRAISE FOR Walk Like the Bird Flies by Susan Ayres These poems transport us from Texas desert landscapes to New England mountains to Adriatic tavernas, festivals, and landmarks, and at the same time they offer vivid confrontations with the elements of the natural world—mud, fire, water, forests, the wind that possibly “[carries] messages from beyond”—treating both foreign cities and nature’s manifestations as phenomena to observe and honor through the eyes of an estranged but receptive traveler. Susan Ayres fuses images from inner and outer landscapes, raising questions that can’t be answered and perspectives that can’t be contained but nevertheless offer sparks of revelation in poem after poem. –Leslie Ullman, (The You That All Along Has Housed You and Library of Small Happiness) “Listen to me as one listens to the rain,” Susan Ayres begins this incredible journey, because only when she listens to the rain can her imagination wander and guide us through a history and geography that is at once personal and cosmic in its reach. Indeed, she ends with a long poem that itself carries us from “from silkworms to / Skies.” But what is even more exciting, and so skillfully done, is the kind counterpointing that moves us from a medieval bridge in Slovenia to the American west to a contemporary beach to Led Zeppelin, a combination that requires great skill and vision. And skill and vision are what we have here, giving us a new sense and appreciation of our world, for Ayres has given us poetry’s version of Galileo’s Starry Messenger. –Richard Jackson, Author of The World as Framed: New and Select Poems Please share/repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #read #poems #literature #poetry

A baby found in the rubble of a U.S. raid in Afghanistan was adopted by a Marine. Once-secret documents and @AP reporting in the village reveal details that thrust this raid into an ongoing controversy over who the military killed. apnews.com/article/afghanist…