Quiet Lightning is pleased to host a virtual event with Omnidawn Publishing for their seasonal launch of new titles, for which each author will be reading from their work. Be the first to own these new treasures:

Omitting All That Is Usually Said by Robin Caton

The Wayfarer by Cyrus Console

The Patient is an Unreliable Historian by Brody Parrish Craig

Archon / After by Ruth Ellen Kocher

SUR by David Koehn

Defensible Space/if a crow— by Ian Lockaby

Percussing the Thinking Jar by Maw Shein Win

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.

About Omitting All That Is Usually Said by Robin Caton

In Omitting All That is Usually Said, Robin Caton explores the nature of light, form, language, meaning, and thought, alongside the complexity of their interwoven relationships. Caton interrogates the workings of the human mind and explores the way we integrate disparate perceptions. Caton questions whether we can be certain that things really exist and that all we experience isn’t simply a play of light and shadow. She considers how we live with all the limitations and emotional turmoil imbedded in humanity, while also maintaining a sense of something we call perfection. The poems of Omitting All That is Usually Said investigate how we might capture the depths of conflicting experiences and lived knowledge in ways that we can comprehend, and they marvel at how we find delight in all of it.

Robin Caton is the author of The Color of Dusk. Her poems have appeared in various journals including Generator, Columbia Poetry Review, and 6ix, and her short story “B, Longing” is included in the fabulist fiction collection, Paraspheres. Caton is a senior instructor at Dharma College in Berkeley, and she lives in Walnut Creek, California.

To have Omitting All That Is Usually Said sent to your door, order here.

About The Wayfarer by Cyrus Console

Taking its name from part of a lost triptych by Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, The Wayfarer documents its speaker’s attempt to forge a path through the world—both as a father and as an artist—and to adequately capture the experience of living through poetry. In language that melds the vernacular and the archival, these ballads recall moments of love as they arise in an everyday existence dominated by an awareness of political and ecological collapse. Caught between the terror of wandering and the awe of witnessing new minds as they acquire early words and memories, the poems hold out hope for the tenuous transmission of meaning between generations.

Cyrus Console is the author of Brief Under Water, The Odicy, and Romanian Notebook. He lives in Kansas City.

To have The Wayfarer sent to your door, order here.

About The Patient is an Unreliable Historian by Brody Parrish Craig

The poems of Brody Parrish Craig’s new collection upends narratives around current psychiatric treatment models to focus on the lived experience of survivors and to speak toward liberation, abolition, and disability justice. Titled after the author’s own medical records, The Patient Is an Unreliable Historian questions the prevailing narrative that the medical industry knows stories of disability and madness better than those who have lived them.

Craig uses lyricism to expose the intersection of madness and criminality in contemporary American culture, moving through institutions, community spaces, and loss of kin. Through the course of the collection, the speaker turns toward irreverence and interrogation, carves out their own freedom, and challenges the script of the patient, the mad, and the “criminal.” These poems deconstruct the “patient” to set the person free.

Brody Parrish Craig (they/them) is the author of Boyish, which won the 2019 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest. Their writing has been published in Muzzle Magazine, Poetry, Mississippi Review, New South, Missouri Review, and TYPO, among others. They are the editor of TWANG, a regional anthology of trans and gender nonconforming creators from the South and Midwest. A 2022 recipient of Artist 360’s Community Activator Award, Craig currently co-leads TLGBQ+ community arts programming in the Ozarks.

To have The Patient is an Unreliable Historian sent to your door, order here.

About Archon / After by Ruth Ellen Kocher

In Ruth Ellen Kocher’s Archon / After, the archive is revealed as both a form of violence and of memory, of site and of event. As keeper of the archive, Kocher’s archon determines what pieces of the past may be preserved, housed, documented, ordered, and reviewed. Through these poems, the archon dives deep into memories and into the mysteries of daily life, and, in governance over the future, determines what will be and should be forgotten. The act of forgetting becomes archival violence, with the archon not only serving as the guardian of what remains in the archive but also as an eradicator who decides what is purged.

The imagistic and surreal language of this collection invites us to explore a non-logical terrain as we follow the protagonist into her darkest memories and find a path for our own journey of self-discovery.

Ruth Ellen Kocher is the author of eight previous books: godhouse; Third Voice, winner of the PEN Open Book Award; Ending in Planes; Goodbye Lyric: The Gigans and Lovely Gun; domina Un/blued, which won the Dorset Prize and the 2014 PEN/Open Book Award; One Girl Babylon, winner of the Green Rose Prize; When the Moon Knows You’re Wandering; and Desdemona’s Fire. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Cave Canem Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo and is a contributing editor at Poets & Writers Magazine. She is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Colorado.

To have Archon / After sent to your door, order here.

About SUR by David Koehn

Drawing on a range of stylistic influences, the poetry of Sur takes on the essence of connection and the ways in which we continually develop meaning about others and to the natural world. With this collection, David Koehn paints a landscape where wilderness intertwines with human emotions and grows between ill-fitting interpersonal connections. Sur invites readers to step back and look critically at their world while remaining intimately intertwined with it. Throughout, imagery of nature—like a snake drinking from a stream, or a mountain god—blends with the emotional landscape of tumultuous relationships, exploring themes of wildness and an inevitable unraveling of secrets.

David Koehn is the author of SUR, Compendium, Scatterplot, and Twine, which won the May Sarton Poetry Prize. Koehn’s writing has appeared in chapbooks and literary magazines including The Rumpus, McSweeney’s, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Rhino, Volt, Carolina Quarterly, Diagram, Greensboro Review, North American Review, Smartish Pace, Hotel Amerika, Gargoyle, Zyzzyva, and Prairie Schooner.

To have SUR to your door, order here.

About Defensible Space/if a crow— by Ian Lockaby

Considering how we might detox from old languages, systems, and modes of life, Ian Lockaby’s poems seek out new forms of interconnectivity and possibility, finding the energy of emerging worlds along the edges of ruins. This collection poses questions of how to thrive in aftermaths, suggesting that attempts at absolute knowledge are less powerful than an embrace of the unknown. Throughout these poems, Lockaby uses crows as a model for dynamic adaption and creative entanglement with the world and with language, finding “defensible space” for new lyrical syntax amid shifts and desolation: “Everywhere a burning root system. Everywhere, a root fire crowing off the splayed tail feathers of a crow.”

Defensible Space/if a crow—looks towards a reintroduction of fire into wilds and wilds into our lives, taking the unknown of an “if” as the base from where we can build life.

Defensible Space/if a crow– won Omnidawn’s 2022 Poetry Chapbook contest, selected by Ruth Ellen Kocher.

Ian Lockaby is a poet, translator, and editor of the journal mercury firs. He is the author of the chapbook A Seam of Electricity, and his poetry has been published in journals including Fence, Bennington Review, Poetry Northwest, Ecotone, Volt, and Denver Quarterly. His translations of Latin American poetry have been published in Black Warrior Review, Circumference, Washington Square Review, and others. For many years he lived in and around Olympia, WA, where he worked on vegetable farms, and he now lives in New Orleans.

To have Defensible Space/if a crow— sent to your door, order here.

About Percussing the Thinking Jar by Maw Shein Win

With her latest collection, Maw Shein Win deftly braids together the pleasures, pains, and anxieties of living in an aging body, revealing how a mind can log thoughts and observations. Win employs new poetic forms to invite her readers into realms that are both deeply personal and universal, rendered with dreamlike imagery and surprising humor. Reflecting on our strange times and the atmospheric undercurrents of chaos and disintegration, Percussing the Thinking Jar is a hypnotic book and invites the reader into conversation with their own vulnerability and resilience. Throughout the book, sumi ink drawings by artist Mark Dutcher echo the rhythms of Win’s poetry.

Maw Shein Win is the author of the chapbooks Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone and of poetry collections including Invisible Gifts and Storage Unit for the Spirit House, the latter also published by Omnidawn and nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA’s Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She teaches at the University of San Francisco, was selected as a 2023 YBCA 100 Honoree, and is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA.

To have Percussing the Thinking Jar sent to your door, order here.

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This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

Authors and books are pictured above as listed, clockwise from top left.

Background photo is of China Camp Beach, site of QL's recent event with CA State Parks, by Kevin Dublin