BLUES for FRENCH ROAST with CHICORY:
Poems by Martina Reisz Newberry
60 poems ~ 86 pages
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-9600293-9-6
Publisher: Deerbrook Editions
To Order: www.deerbrookeditions.com


ABOUT THE BOOK:


Blues for French Roast with Chicory is a 50-poem blues riff, a rumination, a wakeup call,
and a gratifying mix of visionary poems about life—with all its complexities: love
affairs, friendships, ageing, dreaming, what there is to be afraid of—or not, and a ready
recognition that none of us are alone on our journeys.


ADVANCE PRAISE:


Newberry’s poems arrive like a friend bearing news. We think we are to hear something
ordinary, then suddenly it becomes unusual. Or we find ourselves being told something
odd … and it gets even odder.
     Newberry is a poet of spiritual surprise, a poet of transcending images pulled from a
very real, contemporary, attentive woman’s life.
—John Balabin, author of Locusts At the Edge of Summer, and the winner of the Academy
of American Poet’s Lamont Prize.

Herein you will find poems in which the sky can break into jigsaw puzzle pieces and fall
to the ground, the setting winter sun apologizes for leaving homeless people still cold,
and a skyfull of stars consider their own mortality.
     These are poems full of magic and ghosts: the corpulent ghost with “a thunderstorm of
a smile” in the title poem and the “great ghosts” of Geodes. Or the magic can be as simple as
the transcendence of snow falling expressed by one who’s never seen it fall.
—From the foreword by Michael Arcangelini, author of With Fingers At the Tips of My
Words and Room Enough.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


Martina Reisz Newberry has been writing for 60 years. A passionate lover of Los
Angeles, she currently lives there with her husband, Brian Newberry, a Media Creative.
She is the author of Never Completely Awake (2017), Where it Goes (2014), and
Learning by Rote (2012), all published by Deerbrook Editions. She is the author of
Running Like a Woman with Her Hair on Fire: Collected Poems (Red Hen Press, 2005).

Ms. Newberry is also the author of Lima Beans and City Chicken: Memories of the Open
Hearth—a memoir of her father, (one of the first men ever to be hired at Kaiser Steel in
Fontana, CA in 1943)—published by E.P. Dutton and Co. in 1989.

Newberry has been included in many literary journals and magazines in the U.S. and
abroad. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo Colony for the Arts, Djerassi
Colony for the Arts, and Anderson Center for Disciplinary Arts. She is included in "The
Sixty Four Best Poets of 2018" (Black Mountain Press).


FROM THE BOOK:


Morning Glories
by Martina Reisz Newberry

Bitter unkind Autumn
when the gloaming grips the sky,
whines like a whipped dog.

The light produces an
exquisite ungainliness,
a clumsy attempt at dance.

At night, a small light,
only as bright as
a single candle,

shows me the dark mouth
of the closet door
open to devour or expiate

my sins by sacrificing sleep.
Autumn is a pliable
sort of mourning. And, still,

a mourning in deed.
Years ago, I called my mother
to tell her my Morning Glories

had bloomed. “And what,”
she asked me “is so glorious
about mornings?”

A flood of fear made
my scalp tingle, my mouth
dried up. I had no answer

then. I do now. Now
I would tell her that
any morning you wake up

is glorious and all sins
Are forgiven as long as you
keep the closet door closed.

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