About the Book Blue Ghosts:
Blue Ghosts contains poems about what haunts us, what fascinates us, what we cannot leave behind because of what we carry within: experiences, memories, emotions, and desires. The collection catalogs defining moments, those that shift everything that comes after, and the feelings accompanying them: fear, grief, envy, resentment, hope, and intense love. The poems explore how we find and make meaning out of loss, how we transform ourselves and our lives. They seek understanding and comfort—sometimes found, sometimes not—in the natural world. Through them we traverse many landscapes, both literal and metaphorical, including a small rural town, the Catskill Mountains, the desert, the hospital, the monastery, and the garden; we engage with all manner of wild life, such as crows and foxes, dandelions and phlox, bottle flies and blue ghost fireflies. The poetry resonates with an appreciation of the difficulties and the miracles of the everyday, of the ordinary, and reminds us of how we fit, how we belong, even when it feels that we do not. Each poem becomes a dewdrop containing “clouds / in reflected heavens” that medieval legend tells us ravens consumed upon being born, “drop / by / drop.”
About the Author:
Kathryn DeZurKathryn DeZur is a poet and professor of English at SUNY Delhi. She moved from the West Coast to Oneonta twenty years ago, and much of her imagery is drawn from the landscapes of the Catskill Mountains region.Her poems have appeared in Blueline, The Fourth River, Fickle Muses, Literary Mama, The Teacher’s Voice, Mother Verse, and Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, as well as in anthologies such as Strange Attractors: A Collection of Mathematical Love Poems and Zeus Seduces the Wicked Stepmother in the Saloon of the Gingerbread House.
About the Book The Green and the Growing:In this intriguing tale of the clash of two worlds and cultures, Miquita, one of the forty-two daughters of Commander Hritrar, is sent to the Rubruii after their defeat at her father’s hands. Hampered by diplomatic etiquette and a thoroughly alien culture, Miquita struggles to understand the destruction her father has leveled against the cities and orchards that depend on a failing artificial intelligence. Can she help repair the terrible damage her father’s forces have inflicted? Perhaps more importantly: should she?
About the Author:
Erin K. Wagner is a speculative fiction writer, interested in examining how the human responds to the nonhuman. She grew up in southeast Ohio on the border of Appalachia, but now lives in central New York, where she hikes in the Catskills and listens for ghostly games of nine-pins. She holds her Ph.D. in medieval literature and teaches literature and writing in the SUNY system. She splits her time between academic research, investigating how medieval English writers navigated their own religious identities, and creative writing. Her short stories have appeared in a variety of publications, from Apex to Clarkesworld. You can visit her website at https://erinkwagner.com/.