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2023 TITLES
HOW TO SCAN A POEM: A POETRY WITCH WORKBOOK
by Annie Finch
Publication date: April, 2023
Poet Annie Finch shares her lifelong passion for meter and scansion with poetry lovers and poets in this uniquely useful book. From the basic tools and fundamental 3 steps of scansion to the most complex metrical delights, How to Scan a Poem covers it all: accentual poems, anapests, trochees, iambs, dactyls, and more, with sample poems you can scan right in the book and explorations of the all-important connections between meter and meaning. The art of Deep Scansion you will learn here invites you to enter the poet’s own voice, mind, and inner ear in the most intimate of ways. “Scansion is widely considered to be a way of thinking-and yet it is a way of hearing, a way of feeling, a way of listening, a way of dancing. Truly, scansion is a way of living.” -Annie Finch
2022 TITLES
by Jeffrey Betcher
Foreword by Annie Finch
Publication date: June, 2022
Diagnosed with a terminal cancer, poet and community activist Jeffrey Betcher spent the last months of his life crafting an extraordinary crown of sonnets. Filled with grief, humor, truth, and triumph, singing with powerful rhythms and unforgettable words, this is poetry at its best.
Although Jeffrey had never written in meter before, at his mentor Annie Finch’s suggestion he began a crown of anapestic sonnets that developed into the gorgeous and unstinting testament of a courageous soul navigating illness and facing death. Perfecting this extraordinary group of poems became a focus of the final months of Jeffrey’s life. Now they offer all readers a rare poetic gift, adept and searching, shot through with honesty, wit, and courage. This memorial chapbook is the first publication of the sonnets.
AUDIO BONUS
Jeffrey Betcher and Annie Finch discuss poetry and death…
This is the conversation referenced in Annie’s Preface to Whistling Through.
Jeffrey Betcher (1960-2017) was a writer, educator, advocate for the prevention of violence against women and children, and a grassroots community organizer who founded the Quesada Gardens Initiative. Jeffrey was born in rural Ohio and lived in San Francisco for 30 years, gaining national attention as a pioneer in the guerilla garden movement by turning his dangerous street in the Bayview neighborhood into an urban oasis. His writings, often centered on LGBTQ themes, include short stories, journalism, and The Fucking Seasons, Selected Poems 1986 to 2016.
“Whistling Through” is an odyssey into the cancer machine and death itself.
—Chase Dimock
“Whistling Through” is a major poem, an important contribution to anapestic poetry in English, to gay literature, to the form of the crown of sonnets, and to the literature of mortality.
—Annie Finch
Betcher’s crown of sonnets is an alchemical transmutation where his ordeal becomes a no-holds-barred odyssey that’s profound, funny, terrifying, and utterly dazzling.
—Lex Nover
OPENING POEM FROM WHISTLING THROUGH
- Diagnosis
Diagnosis is terminal. Life finds its shape
A few feet from the ground as it tries to take flight
In a fog of dead air, with a load of dead weight,
And a pilot who’s just lost all feeling and sight.
I can hear the unknowable next whistling through …
… Through bright holes in a scan, through my fingers and bones,
Through the cracks in my plans … whistling right through.
It’s the sound of a song I must sing, but don’t know.
Life can syncopate: music, familiar but strange,
As the rhythm of spirit and flesh swells and fades,
Innuendo from angels that gravity waits
For this tangle of melody … death … to unbraid.
In the time it takes sunrise to free the day’s light,
“It’s not good news,” can sum up the faint sounds of night.
2021 TITLES
Sing Doun the Mune! Selected Ballads
Publication date: October 31, 2021
W. H. Auden awarded Helen Adam the New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin Award for “excellence in craft”; Richard Howard described her ballads as “glittering sorceries”; and Robert Duncan referred to her as “the grain of living poetry that saves me at times.” Adam’s magical ballads, the core of her poetry, are collected here for the first time with her own thoughts on the ballad and commentary by Annie Finch and Kristin Prevallet.
Hail the singularity of Pixie Pool! Hail the doyenne of golden monstrous hair, devouring our hunger for wild ballads both ancient-rooted and shiny new as only she can do! —Lee Ann Brown
The luminous balladeer Helen Adam was an anomaly who dropped into the most experimental scenes of contemporary poetry. Her unique orality has been engraved on many generations of poets. She now enters our contemporary consciousness through the reprint of these ballads, playing out as they do the timeless battles of the psyche. —Anne Waldman
