Judith Waller Carroll: Ask the River to Talk About the Horses
“In Ask the River to Talk About the Horses, Judith Waller Carroll shares beautifully written
poems about growing up in Montana. Her poems travel in time, and as I read them, I feel like
I’m walking through history. She skillfully takes you inside the physiology and the psyche of the
horses she loves: “How their hoof beats scattered the leaves / that fell from the trees each
autumn.” Her poems reveal new ways of seeing, poems that move the way horses do, “their
manes flowing like wind / each sigh and nicker echoing across the sky.”
—Diane Frank, author of While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems
Honky-Tonk Girl
All those years living so close
to my grandfather’s bar
taught me two things: whiskey
could take an ordinary moment
and turn it into a dream or a nightmare,
and music could make you ache
at the beauty of loneliness.
The jukebox would play “Crazy”
or “Walkin’ after Midnight”
and the woman I longed to become
would float out of my body
on a voice as pure
as a bird’s first song at daybreak.
And always the steel guitar, weeping.
Judith Waller Carroll grew up in Montana, spent thirty years in the San Francisco Bay Area,
sixteen years in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas, and currently lives in the Portland area in
Oregon—all locales that inspire her work. Carroll is the author of Ordinary Splendor (MoonPath
Press, 2022), What You Saw and Still Remember, a runner-up for the 2017 Main Street Rag
Poetry Award, The Consolation of Roses, winner of the 2015 Astounding Beauty Ruffian Press
Poetry Prize, and Walking in Early September (Finishing Line Press, 2012). Her poems have
been read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac, published in numerous journals and
anthologies, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is retired from a
career in public relations and fundraising.
Judith online at Poets & Writers
https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/judith_waller_carroll
Visit Judith’s page at MoonPathPress.com
Purchase Judith’s collection from your favorite retailer:
Ted McMahon: Visitations
The poems in Visitations contemplate our search for belonging with a lyricism and restraint that
magnifies their remarkable beauty and wisdom. Here is the voice of a thinker, observer, friend,
descendant, doctor, survivor, a voice of integrity and honor. “The path is faint but unmistakable,”
Ted McMahon writes. It’s a great gift to read a poet who finds the path toward human
connection and follows it.
—Kathleen Flenniken, Washington State Poet Laureate emerita
For My Grandfather
The wind flows cloud across the Burren,
flows across and scours exposed bones
of the world, while the morning bells fade
in the distance above the high crosses.
On a morning much like this one
in the wind-chopped bay, a steamer
headed west out of Galway City,
a boy of fifteen on deck, alone. A boy
in a poorhouse coat, ill-fitting hat,
a blue star, for starboard, tattooed between
thumb and finger of his right hand,
a green anchor, for port, on his left.
Steady in his gaze, grey curtains
of cloud, grey stone,
and the grey-green sea
melt together, form
his last look at this land.
Born in 1946 to second-generation Irish parents, Ted McMahon grew up in Oak Hill Park, near
Boston, one of the many post-WWII planned residential developments. He graduated from
Williams College and Duke University School of Medicine and practiced pediatrics in Eugene,
OR, and later Seattle. Since 1998 he has channeled his love of language into poetry. His poems
have appeared in The Seattle Review, The Comstock Review, and
The Journal of the American Medical Association, among others. He’s authored the chapbook First Fire and the full-length
collection, The Uses of Imperfection. He received a Jack Straw Fellowship, an Artist Trust GAP
grant, and has served as an editor at Floating Bridge Press and the online journal Bracken. Since
1986, Ted lives in Seattle with his wife Rosanne Olson— photographer, musician, and artist.
Visit Ted’s page at MoonPathPress.com
Purchase Ted’s collection from your favorite retailer:
Sarah Stockton: Pelican’s Daughter
Reading Pelican’s Daughter felt like stepping into the very “cathedral with wings” Stockton
yearningly summons. This book is an intimate, attentive, and coasting exploration (like the
central pelican totem itself) of loss in many iterations—of parents, of selves, of obligation and
posturing. In Stockton’s deft and wondering hands, these poems have hollow-bones: the space
for breath and questions to sing through, the structure capable and necessary to allow grief a
graceful flight.!
—Lisbeth White, author of American Sycamore, winner of the Perugia Press Prize
Spreading Ashes
My father flew on a white pelican
into the sky when the sails
of his boat no longer unfurled
and the riverbed ran dry
the pelican scooped him up
into the squadron, carried
his ashes from Oregon
to the Columbia, to Walla Walla
and then, turning west, soared
(though some would say I imagined it)
to the shore of the Salish Sea
where I saw this white pelican
skim the pearling water. My father
glided off the crèche of the pelican’s
black-tipped back, bringing
his bones back to me.
Sarah Stockton is the author of the chapbooks Time’s Apprentice (dancing girl press, 2021) and
Castaway (Glass Lyre Press, 2022) and the full-length The Scarecrow of My Former Self
(MoonPath Press, 2024), a finalist for both the Sally Albiso Award and the Washington State
Book Award for Poetry. Sarah was the founder and editor in chief of River Mouth Review. Her
poems have appeared in
About Place Journal, Glass Poetry, Blue Mountain Review, Crab Creek
Review, Poetry Northwest, Whale Road Review, Psaltery & Lyre
, and Rogue Agent, among
others, including several anthologies. Sarah lives on the Olympic Peninsula by the Salish Sea, in
Washington state.
Visit Sarah’s page at MoonPathPress.com
Purchase Sarah’s collection from your favorite retailer:
