Puckerbrush Press

Of Claiming, Patricia Ranzoni writes: "Learning how I've descended from Mayflower passengers, then Cromwell's Scottish deportees, "witches" and clergy, revolutionary patriots and loyalists, farming and seafaring families, woodsmen and women, papermakers, schooled and unschooled musicians and artists from coastal, upriver, and downeast Maine; and how I was honored in the womb with Native lullabies by a Penobscot Nation Medicine Man, Ii see why I could no more keep from claiming the rhythms rising from eleven generations of life in Maine territory than I imagine any other creature long here could. That knowledge being the whole of my qualification to try to write this place as I have known it, one of many Maines, into poems. Having no greater hope for this collection (ordered here more by season and story than when written) than to help record and testify to my people's language and ways, I offer Claiming--from first native folks notes to recent, more practiced pieces--as regional voice: from as well as about.

"Patricia Ranzoni's words? They look like home to me. Sound like home. Feel like home. Where and what else in all this world would be worth calling home, but here in these poeple-ly pages?"--Caroyln Chute

Patricia Smith Ranzoni's first two books of poetry, Claiming and Settling, were published by Puckerbrush Press. Her latest book is Only Human: Poems from the Atlantic Flyway.

In this unique example of the printer's craft, each square page is free, and reads like this:

Lee Sharkey, poet and publisher, and long-time contributor to Puckerbrush Review, is now associated with the Beloit Journal. She used to run her own press in South Solon, Maine, and is the author of at least six books.

Margaret Shipley's third collection of poems, written in her eighties, is luminous. Central to At Water's Edge is knowledge of change, which of course comes from time ("It comes. It goes. / It has gone") and the losses that accompany it. But change begins with the "first plunge / into language": "From then on,"  Shipley tells us, "there's danger of change. Beautiful danger of terrible change." The transformative power of language allows Shipley to carry a deep lesson of childhood ("A child who is denied the ripe fruit... / will go instead for the source") through an arc of passion and loss, to a deeply won ability to follow a muse "made of motion" into a resolving and elusive wisdom. Water is the appropriately central metaphor here; but unlike the woman in "Of Water" who "unforms / before anyone can embrace her," Shipley stands at water's edge, sometimes swimming back into the past, often looking into a deeper underworld, but ultimately, like the shards of her broken water jar, singing a "random song" that is, for her and for us, a "braver joy for the breaking."--Martha Collins

Margaret Shipley was born in Pasadena, California, in 1913, and, after traveling and working in France and Greece, married, raised two sons, and worked in publishing for a number of years. She has published two eariler collections of poems, Burning the Trees and The Light Angels, and a novel, Sound of the Sun.

Dead of Winter, poems by Michael McMahon, continues the distinctive voice of McMahon's first collection, A Day's Work, published by Puckerbrush Press in 1976. It is a New England voice seemingly diffident but in reality memorable in its tenaciousness. New England is once again the scene, and winter the season, New England's quintessential season. They are poems in black and white, like trees in a snowy landscape.