When we last checked in with Utah Poet Laureate Lisa Bickmore’s mobile micro-press, the project had published 19 chapbooks. That number has nearly doubled. Bickmore conceived Moon in the Rye as her signature project as Utah Poet Laureate, working directly with writers to develop small editions of their work. The press funds 50 printed copies of each chapbook, while also preserving the books digitally, where they remain freely available to readers.
Here’s a treasure map to just some of the jewels hiding in plain sight on Moon in the Rye’s virtual shelf — we’re so lucky to have this micropress project by Utah’s Poet Laureate, Lisa Bickmore, with world-class book design by Jem Ashton— and the sparkling collections by talented and distinguished Utah authors just keep coming.
Just a sampling of the 37 chapbooks available online as gorgeous digital books you can read anytime you’d like a quick infusion of beauty, or take a deep dive into some spectacular writing:
-
Onaqui Horses of the West Desert by Joel Long, who will serve as Salt Lake City’s first Poet Laureate, is a lyrical and poetic nonfiction essay about wild herds in the Great Basin. It is “an exercise in vast” that “turns light inside us in a way that will never leave,” and includes some of Joel’s outstanding photographs.
-
Utah Reclamation Project by Amy Brunvand begins with an epigram by Robert Smithson, “Nature is never finished,” and covers a lot of ground, flora and fauna, to create a moving portrait of the West, “This monument of total annihilation….” and “frozen time / Before all becomes less than nothing.” A whole section of Great Salt Lake Poems includes a winner of the Alfred Lambourne Prize.
-
Reluctant Man by Jerry VanIeperen is a masterful collection in the vein of New York and Black Mountain Schools with a sprinkling of the Beats. “The tent is a sky instead of canvas / staked and entwined / on mountain tips / all intemperate beauty instead / tangles of streetlamps…”
-
No Sea Here by Dana Henry Martin, an exceptionally beautiful and substantial book, details “the way my attention flows / out the window each morning—no matter / how much I despaired the night before—”
-
Votive of the Everyday Divinity by Jamison Conforto presents the voice of an archetypal persona, the Traveler who “saw a path / Through the brush and under the bridge / And prayed it led where he meant to go…” “The sky is darker now / And worship is best practiced with a broken heart / And I sang those secret hymns / At the crossroads…”
-
Fragile House by Shawn Dallas Stradley finds the sublime in the everyday, such as eating oatmeal or cleaning out the refrigerator, and “for a few minutes / sparks ignite in the wh0-cares-what” that is “just air, / and breathing, / the sounds around us, / things we see—”
-
Borderlands by Andrew Martin is at once abstract and concrete, specializing in paradox that rewards contemplation. Some poems “speak plainly,” while others “shimmer at the edges … with moments of rupture still vibrating….with brilliance, with what was lost and broken.”
-
Everything Turns into its Opposite by Leslie Kelen collects poems written from 1976-1984 that are at once timeless and contemporary, as in “The Hidden Fire.” “Watch carefully / everything is moving…. the glowing embers of your body / draw the light in.”
Rachel White is the author of a poetry chapbook, The Velvet Earth After Rain (Moon in the Rye Press, 2024), selected as a “Notable Read” by the Utah Humanities Book Awards, and co-founder/editor of THE NOMAD Literary Journal, published online at the-nomad.org and in an annual print edition.
Categories: Book Reviews | Literary Arts
