“Great wit, music, and pacing. Vivid passionate hungers, all stitched through the nubby fabric of aging with gorgeous shining threads. We can wrap ourselves right up in these poems for courage and verve.” – Naomi Shihab Nye

Flowstone Press, an imprint of Left Fork Books, is pleased to announce our latest book: a collection from the irrepressible Judith Arcana. Announcements from the Planetarium examines aging and changing, wisdom and memory, and includes poems from Arcana’s Mixtape Series and her Speculative Music Theory quartet.

As Judith Vollmer notes, “Judith Arcana’s poems [are] both familiar and refreshingly strange …. jagged elegies on ‘time available’ and ‘the short version,’ dazzling crows, lonely streets, and mournful seers, with a hyper-realist eye on the past.”

The book is now available from Amazon.com. Below is ‘Dreaming the Indian Ocean,’ a selection from the book. You can also listen to Judith’s conversation with Ken Jones on the KBOO program Between the Covers. Scroll down for more information about Judith and other Flowstone/Left Fork titles by the same author.

Dreaming the Indian Ocean

You old ones, my people, when you passed childhood
were you surprised to learn so many had the same dream?
Had you thought, like me, you were the only small one
who turned your bed to a boat in the clear deep water
a boat in deep blue sky, sailing and flying the world?
Did you get where you wanted to go? Where was that?

I wanted to fly in my bed all the way to the Indian Ocean
where the great whales of every sea would swim green
deep water each year, giving birth and nursing their young.
What made that my dream? What could I have known, then
of their lives? This is the mystery left from my youth, deep
in the time before knowledge. The rest, now, I understand.

ABOUT JUDITH ARCANA

Author Photo by Alan Borrud

Born and raised in the Great Lakes region, Judith Arcana has lived in the Pacific Northwest since 1995. She writes poems, stories, essays and books, including a well-loved biography of Grace Paley (‘Grace Paley’s Life Stories’) and the poetry collections ‘What if your mother,’ ‘4th Period English,’ ‘The Parachute Jump Effect,’ and ‘Here From Somewhere Else,’ which received the Editor’s Choice Chapbook Award from ‘Turtle Island Quarterly.’ Her story ‘Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture’ won the first Minerva Rising Prose Prize and was published as a chapbook; ‘Keesha and Joanie and JANE,’ her zine about what happens when Roe v Wade is overturned in the near future, is rooted in her work as a Jane in Chicago’s underground abortion service (Judith has written a collection of JANE stories and hopes they’ll be a book someday). She hosts a monthly poetry show on KBOO community radio in Oregon (listen online anywhere/anytime). For more about – and examples of – her work, visit JudithArcana.com.

Other Flowstone Press or Left Fork Books by Judith Arcana:

Here From Somewhere Else
December 2015

According to Jennifer Richter, “Judith Arcana’s gorgeous new collection, has movement at its core. Many of these poems are fueled by questions—questions that generate a powerful urgency and contribute to the book’s compelling internal momentum.” The book received the 2015 Turtle Island Quarterly Editor’s Choice Chapbook Award.

Available now from Amazon.com.