A Reading with Sixteen Rivers Press

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The sections in Lenore Myers’s Afterimages are aptly called galleries, for the reader will find in them a poet’s explorations of paintings, sculptures, and other artworks (Balthus, DeFeo, Tarkovsky, and others). These artworks are deconstructed and reconstructed with sharp-eyed linguistic grace and originality as the poet reveals these artworks as collaborations among artists, subjects, and viewers. The collection evolves into a mind’s deep inquiry, skillfully shared to become the reader’s inquiry. Memories of people and places are woven throughout: family brutalities, complexities, and tendernesses. Afterimages offers the reader the pleasure, discomfort, and understanding gained through an artful response to life.

"The poems in Lenore Myers’s debut collection Afterimages explore the complex interactions between artist and subject, including the darker implications of aesthetic “mastery”—manipulation, cooptation, objectification, even abuse—in which the artist strives to “capture the soul” of a subject, confine it in a frame, and offer it to the public as a salable commodity. Myers’s poems seek to break the confining frame and to restore the reified self to the dynamic, if destabilizing, dance of becoming. And as if that weren’t plenty (it is), she also recognizes how her own practice as poet relates to an artist’s originating efforts, placing her subjects and herself in the “little rooms” of her stanzas. If you want to know how art can make a difference in our lives, read these poems." — John Canaday, author of Critical Assembly: Poems of the Manhattan Project

"Conventional forms of ekphrasis are often little more than poetic descriptions of art. But there is nothing conventional about Lenore Myers’s Afterimages. The poems in this fabulous collection go beyond description, beyond the page, beyond the canvas, beyond looking and seeing, beyond interpretation and reflection, beyond decoding. They participate in what we might call an expanded ekphrasis that takes the dialogue between art and poetry to new levels of interactivity. This is a book that asks big questions about how we perceive and process the acts of making art and engaging with its aftereffects. Art lasts. It lingers. In our heads and in our hearts." — Dean Rader, author of

Children of Obscura: This Mysterious Human, Dane Cervine’s second book of prose poems with Sixteen Rivers Press, combines a luminous array of scientific facts with enigmatic stories—stories not only about human life but, importantly, about the complexities of physical life itself, the intricacies of matter flowering into entire worlds. Cervine’s accessible and intriguing poems reflect the wonders of both the physical science to which we’re bound and the physio-anthropology of humans on this obscure planet rotating in the vastness of space. Children of Obscura takes us on a journey that is part cabinet of curiosities, part Zen-imbued guided tour, each poem surprising, each poem a koan of its own.

"The poems of Children of Obscura are koans, prose poems, a stretching out of the traditional haibun; they use known forms to build new. These are poems that unite the poets and scientists, about how knowledge helps and blinds us, written with a poet’s delight in language. Cervine looks at how that “grand but broken scheme” we call curiosity “feeds on the unknown like an addiction.” He is driven by that same curiosity to research, to keep asking questions. Propelled by an awe found in factoids about skin, hair, sexual attraction, astrophysics (“even the explainable is so odd as to elicit wonder”), the poet probes how human consciousness—and concerted attempts to understand it—have brought us to our contemporary context. The world’s “web of entanglements,” instructs Cervine “to read its green meaning” even as he concedes that that “most of what we are lies in tectonic geography beneath.” — FARNAZ FATEMI, author of Sister Tongue

In Carolyn Miller’s Random Universe, the astonishing range of subjects—a reckless polka, a cemetery in Spoleto, the discovery of salvation in the paintings of Cy Twombly—may seem random, but it is a world held together by this poet’s fierce and tender gaze. Miller’s voice, in her fourth collection, is both companionable and wise, funny and stunningly able to find form and beauty in an incomprehensible world. She gives us the music, again and again, for experiences variously wondrous, cruel, and breathtakingly strange in their “jazzy beauty and sheer effrontery” right before our eyes. These are poems of a compassionate observer with remarkable vision, poems that, paradoxically, can awake both calm and wildness in our hearts.

"The universe this book describes may be random, but it is also both gorgeous and familiar. The poet is in love with the details of the world and brings them to the reader like a bouquet delivered right to your door. There is also wisdom and warmth in these poems, a willingness to engage with life and also to see it from a philosopher’s perch. So many adjectives apply to this book: gorgeous, wise, erudite, funny, fun, surprising, heartfelt. There are many pages to savor again and again. After you read Random Universe, you will feel as if you’ve had a delicious meal with an even more delicious conversation." — Zack Rogow, author of Irreverent Litanies

"Carolyn Miller’s new poetry collection is a remarkably inclusive work, with a playfulness in form and structure that feels wonderfully inventive. In these pages, she takes on ekphrastic responses to Cy Twombly’s art, “mistranslations” of Milosz and Tranströmer, and her own translation of an ancient Egyptian text. She creates list-poems of “Lost Language” and “New Lines for Fortune Cookies” and writes about the lives of objects. And through it all, she shows her remarkable talent for writing about sensuous joy, joy that is earned, though haunted by history and the poet’s place in it. I am glad to sit at the banquet table of her Random Universe and feast." — Julia B. Levine, author of Lullaby for the Sixth Extinction

Lenore Myers was born to artist parents who tried to live as semi-bohemians in the suburbs. When that fell apart, the author spent her childhood and youth moving between different towns in Northern California. After spending more years moving around the United States and abroad, she returned to the greater Bay Area to be near family while raising her son. Her chapbook, Regards to Balthus, was published by Seven Kitchens Press in 2023. Her poems and essays appear in a variety of literary journals.

Dane Cervine lives in Santa Cruz, California, where he works as a therapist and writer. He graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a BA in Religious Studies and the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco with a Masters in Integral Counseling Psychology. Through long association with the Emerald Street Writers and Poetry Santa Cruz, Cervine has nurtured, and been nurtured by, a lively literary scene in the Monterey Bay and Greater San Francisco Bay Region. Cervine’s poems have won awards from Adrienne Rich, Tony Hoagland, Atlanta Review, and Caesura, and have been nominated for multiple Pushcarts. His work has appeared in The Sun Magazine, The Hudson Review, Poetry Flash, Catamaran, Miramar, Rattle, Sycamore Review, and Pedestal Magazine, as well as in many anthologies. This is his second book of prose poems with Sixteen Rivers Press.

Carolyn Miller lives in San Francisco, where she writes, paints, and works as a freelance book editor. Her books of poetry are After Cocteau and Light, Moving, both from Sixteen Rivers Press; Route 66 and Its Sorrows from Terrapin Books; and four limited-edition letterpress chapbooks from Protean Press. Her poems have been featured on Poetry Daily and The Writer’s Almanac and have appeared in Smartish Pace, SALT, ONE ART, The Southern Review, and The Gettysburg Review, among other journals, as well as in several anthologies, including Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems: American Places. Her honors include the James Boatwright III Award for Poetry from Shenandoah and the Rainmaker Award from Zone 3.

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