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A MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN RAGES by Melissa Helton

Accents Publishing is proud to announce that Melissa Helton’s first full-length poetry collection, A MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN RAGES is set to release on 5/15, exactly a month from now.
We believe that you will love this book and its powerful messages delivered with exemplary poetic craft! Preorder info to follow.

With fierce energy and a creative use of poetic styles, these poems collaborate as an affirmation against the evils women face and as an entreaty to “thrive in flux,” to pay “deliberate, unceasing attention” to everything in the world, “as if it were holy.”
—Marianne Worthington, author of The Girl Singer

Through these poems, I come to understand the middle-aged woman raging as a community spiritual worker…. These poems are fearless and yet they understand the importance of
acknowledging our fears and telling what we must tell to survive.
—Joy Priest, author of Horsepower

Her passion & artistry left me awed, energized, & ready to write. What more could you want?
—George Ella Lyon, author of Back to the Light: Poems
Kentucky Poet Laureate 2015 – 2016

Revision as a Poet’s Superpower with Tom C. Hunley

Revision as Cooking, Revision as Childrearing, Revision as Midwifing, Revision as a Poet’s Superpower with Tom C. Hunley

A draft of a poem isn’t a broken thing that needs fixed. It’s not a clear, rational argument that needs a little cleaning up, a little editing. It’s a missive from another world that has thus far been only partially-translated.  Or, as writes Philip Metres in “The Art of Losing (and other Visions of Revision),” “Your work is not full of mistakes, and it’s not broken. It’s just not itself yet” (62). Bingo. That bag of flour and that egg? They’re not a bad cake. They haven’t failed you on your birthday. They’re just not a cake yet. A draft is nothing but the ingredients for a poem, lined up and waiting for the skilled chef to go to work. But there’s no definitive recipe, either, because each poem, if it’s good, is a new thing that has never existed yet. It’s a bird, not a birdhouse, as Dean Young tells us in The Art of Recklessness. A poem is something wild and mysterious that is trying to be born, and your arsenal of revision skills may make the difference, for the poem, between living and dying. Please note – This is a revision workshop, so please bring a draft of a poem.

Tom C. Hunley is the author of eight full-length poetry collections, eight chapbooks, two textbooks, and two produced films. He and his wife of twenty-nine years have four amazing kids. Right or wrong, he believes he has impeccable taste when it comes to literature, film, music, and the one woman who has his whole heart. He seriously lacks inner resources, and he’s almost certain that his liver is diseased. He despises generative AI, groupthink, the tortured language of propaganda, big government, and bloated bureaucracies, especially in universities. He has published poems in journals with names beginning with every letter of the alphabet, from Atlanta Review to Zone 3. He is currently working on a novel and a memoir-in-flash.

Online

$40

Tuesday, May 12, 6-8pm EST