In honor of National Poetry Month, we've put ALL our poetry titles on sale at 20% off. The sale applies only to orders placed directly through our online store (no Amazon orders, sorry); at check-out, please enter code Q6C5Z6HY and the discount will be applied.

Thanks for your support of poetry, poets, and independent publishing!

Rabbi/Poet Rachel Barenblat is in Jerusalem for a family bar mitzvah, and we're delighted that she'll also be giving a poetry reading including poems from her two Phoenicia titles, 70 Faces: Torah Poems, and Waiting to Unfold. Rachel is blogging about her trip on her own blog, Velveteen Rabbi.

Bethlehem blogger Vicky, a longtime reader of Rachel's blog, met up with her in the Old City and wrote about the day they spent together. Her post is fascinating reading, contains some beautiful photographs, and is a hopeful comment about the power of personal integrity and good writing that communicates across continents, cultures, and religions.

Have a great trip, Rachel!

photo (c) 2014 Rachel Barenblat

Apple Computer thinks Jon Appleton is pretty cool, and so do we at Phoenicia! For their celebration of the Mac at 30, Apple produced a major publication on their website, featuring one person per year -- artists, designers, musicians, scientists and more -- who have used the Mac in innovative and creative ways that moved computing and culture forward.

Jon Appleton was their choice for the year 1985. Here's what they said:

"Pioneering Electronic Music: Electro-acoustic composer Jon Appleton established one of the first digital music studios in the world, and it was built completely around the Macintosh. With his Appletones software, he developed a revolutionary new way to teach the principles of composition to his students, inspiring musicians for years to come.

Phoenicia congratulates Jon on this well-deserved recognition. Check out his electro-acoustic music at Amazon and iTunes, and his more recent classical compositions here at Phoenicia!

Phoenicia had its best year ever in 2013, and we'd like to thank every single person who contributed: the readers who bought books, the authors who wrote them, the artists whose work graced the book covers and interiors, and the craftspeople who ran the presses and binderies or shipping departments. A lot of minds and hands go into the making of a book, and no matter how advanced our technology becomes, this is still the case.

And we're excited, looking ahead to 2014! The first release will be a new CD of music by Jon Appleton, brilliantly performed by Minkyung Oh. Then there will be a large-format book of photographs of the 60s and 70s: turbulent years of protest, change, and the back-to-the-land movement by Jonathan Sa'adah, with essays by several excellent writers; and later in the spring, a book of prose poems by Luisa Igloria.

So, thank you again for being interested in us, and for your support of independent publishing. It is greatly appreciated!

The weather may be cold, but these holiday savings are hot!

From now until December 16, paperback editions of all our full-length poetry books will be on sale for the price of $12.00 rather than the usual $13.95. Hardback editions of Thaliad and Ancient Lights are also offered at $23.00 instead of $26. The sale price will be applied when you visit the e-store, or any Amazon.com site; for customers in the UK or Europe, the sale prices have been converted to local currency.

Titles included are:
Thaliad : paper and hardcover
70 Faces: Torah Poems
Angels & Beasts
Ancient Lights : paper and hardcover
Mercy Island
Brilliant Coroners

Take advantage of the excellent prices as a gift for yourself or someone special, and support poetry and independent publishing at the same time. The authors and publisher thank you!

Phoenicia is delighted to announce the forthcoming publication of Night Willow, a collection of prose poems by Luisa A. Igloria. Like much of Luisa's work, Night Willow employs memory and associations as well as the ingredients of the everyday, but goes beyond the narrative and the purely lyrical to create a dream-like atmosphere that contains beauty, bewilderment, anguish, and hope.

In writing Night Willow, Igloria said she wanted to stretch both herself and her craft, asking her prose to do "the same hard muscle work I expect in every poem that I write."

"It was an experience that felt almost like trying my hand at musical composition," she said. "I wanted to create mood, tone, networks of memory and echo so that the poems could speak to each other across and within the collection - but at the same time achieve a level of language that is also precise and thoughtful."

At Phoenicia we feel she has achieved this goal, and much more besides, and expect that the readers who come to our press for the highest-quality contemporary poetry -- poetry that also pushes boundaries -- will agree.

Readers may be familiar with Igloria's poem-a-day project, published on Dave Bonta's blog, Via Negativa; what they may not realize is that she was the first Filipina woman of letters installed in the Palanca Literary Hall of Fame in the Philippines, and is an eleven-time winner of that country's highest literary award, the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature (in poetry, non-fiction, and short fiction) as well as having a very long list of American poetry awards to her credit.

Sabine Murray called Igloria "a singular and revelatory voice in American poetry," and Kristin Naca said that in her poems, "measured, intuitive music splendidly unleashes the bewildering in the everyday."

I still remember reading, with admiration and that sense of surprise editors always look for, the first poem Luisa sent to an issue of qarrtsiluni that I was co-editing. Carlos A. Angeles has said: “[Her] poetry inhabits the heart first, then the mind, and the soul…her work contains some of the most extraordinary and most polished poetry written by a Filipino poet in English today.” I agree, but think there is no reason any longer to limit Igloria's strength to one country's poetic output; it is extraordinary and polished poetry by any standard, and we're proud to be publishing this collection.

Claudia Serea, author of Angels&Beasts, read from her work recently as part of the surreal reading at Bowery Art + Science. Congratulations, Claudia!