Special announcement: CERULEANA is now available
Dear Dishwasher Café Subscribers:
My new book of poems, CERULEANA, is now available to order.
Thinking of you all as we inch forward. In case it helps you to know this today: this book took me three years to accrue, two years to peddle fruitlessly, one year to rewrite it AGAIN with next to no hope, and half a year to comb its hair and cram onto the bus once some very kind souls with great brains took it in. Luck is a thing, showing up is a thing, layers of effort and space and time are things, and the help of others is a huge thing— especially wondrous to those of us who are still very much learning to ask for it.
I’ll include more information in subsequent dispatches—on things like an upcoming Zoom reading from this book, other places you can get it, and a coming Kindle ebook version.
For now, here are the cover image and the blurbs & author photo from the back.
Thank you, as always, for reading— and for keeping me writing.
Caroline
Ceruleana is filled with a charged stillness that I have only felt before as a child, when a hurricane’s eye finally arrived and I walked out of the boarded-up house to wonder at my small, quiet, broken world. These poems stumble forward, curl back on themselves, crack apart, crack jokes, embodying both that brokenness and the strength we find to survive it. Caroline Manring has written a beautiful and heartrending book that proves her hypothesis: “layers / of pain like / paint make / luminosity.”
– Dan Rosenberg, author of Bassinet and cadabra, winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize
Caroline Manring’s Ceruleana comes from the deep wood and the blasted fields, unexpectedly in the dark, arriving with the light in the nick of time. These remarkable poems sing, come to your ear like the birdsong you know and yet don’t: they are rare, heart-stopping, and necessary. I will listen again and again.
– Annie Lighthart, author of Pax and Iron String
Awwwww make me weep. Their words, trying to capture maybe what, some etherial hummingbird, You? And my Dwight, his soft quiet capturing soul subtle light and texture, of flight? These words, and no words. Much love much sweet love, Naef