Poetry , Stories & Hybrid Literature from What Books Press (Los Angeles, Calif.)
Carol Potter’s What Happens Next is Anyone’s Guess (Pacific Coast Poetry Series, An imprint of Beyond Baroque Books, Venice, Calif.)
Paperback | 122 pages | April 2022
COVER DESIGNER
“My cover design for What Happens Next is Anyone’s Guess features the painting Sea by Japanese surrealist Harue Koga (1929).”
FROM THE BACK COVER
Here is a collection that reveals what happens when skill meets substantial talent. And what, precisely, is it that happens? The unpredictable—from poem to poem, line to line, a cascade of surprises. Mischief, memory, dream and lusty desire come into play here, and one recurring feature: in virtuoso displays of heady language, the blood and bone of the animal and natural world.
“The first three poems in this book will tell you why you need to read it entire. Carol Potter’s imagination is positively athletic. Muscular, agile. These are poems in which “satisfying” and “close to ruin” can reside in the same moment. This is a poet who can also strike you with quiet recognition: ‘Sometimes you just need to rest your face.’ Check out the love poem ‘Stealth, or A Sweet Bit of Stealing.’ Potter brings playfuness to every poem, no matter how dead serious. One might wonder—amidst all these shenanigans—how does she also manage to be wise? Such is her gift.””
“Powerful, relentless, versatile, pendulous, What Happens Next is Anyone’s Guess will hold you close, submerge you, make you come up for air, and perpetually keep you guessing.”
Peter Harris’s SongAgain (Beyond Baroque Books, Venice, Calif.)
Paperback | 106 pages | October 2022
COVER DESIGNER/TYPESETTER
“The cover of SongAgain features a wonderful abstract painting called Transformation by Robin Strayhorn. I designed the cover and typeset the interior of this powerful new collection from Peter J. Harris.”
FROM THE BACK COVER
For decades now, Peter J. Harris's voice has mesmerized his readers and listeners. He moves us with his words and his presence, his dignity and his vulnerability, with his truth-telling and the way he can spin a tale, turning narrative into song, lyric into incantation. And here he is, doing it again in SongAgain—a most powerful and beautiful collection of poems.
“Peter J. Harris is our bridge to Sterling Brown’s blues and James Brown’s soul. He is our bridge between troubadour and trouble man. Over troubled waters, he is our bridge wired with moonlight and house speakers. He writes, ‘touch me with your dance’ in this dynamic body of work, ‘this body full of impatient Cha cha cha,’ ‘Mahalia’s choppy handclaps,’ ‘slow drag sambas’ and ‘mother’s last call illuminating dusk.’ SongAgain is the mature, moving music of one of our original gangsters for truth, love and poetry.”
“An irrepressible joy leaps from the pages of Peter J. Harris’ tour de force SongAgain. The marriage of his love & care for language (‘welcome to my house built with talk’) with folklore, mythology, and perceptivity is a happy marriage indeed. Harris need not worry about legacy—a theme that recurs in his poems and prose; we readers will be the astonished witnesses to ‘the unsealing soon come’ . . . .”
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