Tag Archives: Accents Publishing

B. Elizabeth Beck and SWAN SONGS

Headshot of B. Elizabeth Beck

Tell us the story of your Accents Publishing book, SWAN SONGS.

Swan Songs was originally a braided manuscript, weaving poetry and stories. I submitted it to Katerina, who liked the stories to stand alone. She and I worked to edit and polish the stories for publication. In the meanwhile, I submitted the poems to Rabbit House Press, who published them in a collection called Dancing on the Page. I feel very fortunate both publishers trusted my work and did such a wonderful job with the books.

What do you like most about it?

Swan Songs is a feminist collection. The stories detail women’s relationships with themselves and others and are political in nature. Each story is framed by a musical artist. The stories are not about the artists, they work as a framing structure and extended metaphor. It was such a delight to research the music to write the stories.

What did you have to overcome in order to finish and publish a book?

Managing time and committing to a manuscript takes dedication. My books evolve over years. Some were written within months, but the editing process takes years, careful consideration, and excellent editors like Katerina Stoykova to be ready to land in readers’ hands.

What do you hope people learn/receive/experience from reading your book?

I hope that women readers experience that nod of recognition in the authenticity of the stories. I hope that music fans enjoy the way I weave music within the text. And I expect that Phish fans find the Easter Eggs in the collection.

What was your favorite interaction with a reader and/or a fan?

I always feel honored when readers send/post reader pictures. What a delight to see my books in the world.

What are you working on now? Catch us up one significant event in your life since the publication of SWAN SONGS.

I am working on a collection of essays about cooking. I’m in the research phase, offering a writing workshop at the Carnegie Center this spring called: Culinary Love Letter to inspire me to shape my essays with recipes. I’m not sure where it is going, but I’m enjoying the process. I’m still engaged in Ekphrastic Writing and am excited to offer Ekphrastic workshops in January through Accents Publishing and the Carnegie Center as well as workshops offered through the Kentucky Humanities Speakers Bureau.

Is there anything you want to get off your chest about writing or publishing?

The publishing world can be demoralizing so connecting with a writing community is very important. I’m so proud of my monthly poetry series, Poetry at the Table at Kenwick Table. 2026 marks the third year of this series and the community that has developed is incredibly valuable to me. I am proud to report that I have all the features booked for 2026 and can’t wait to meet each month for the inspiration the series provides.

Cover of Swan Songs by B. Elizabeth Beck

GOODBYE, BABY by Gaylord Brewer

Goodbye, Baby, the Gaylord Brewer’s first book of poetry in six years, is arguably his most personal—a taut and elegiac sequence of grief and loss, but also of lambent memory, of gratitude, of joy, delivered with lightning strikes of Brewer’s wry humor amidst his signature brand of darkness.

“This collection is a triumph!” — Kathleen Driskell

Accents Publishing is thrilled and proud to bring this book to you!

For more details, sample poem and ordering information, please visit: https://accents-publishing.com/goodbyebaby.html

THE STONE by Joe Survant

Accents Publishing is proud to present The Stone by accomplished poet Joe Survant. Reading these new and selected poems is a form of travel, a spiritual experience, a pilgrimage to visible and invisible worlds. We hope you enjoy this book.

The Stone ships within days and currently the entire Accents Publishing catalog is on 30% off sale.

The Stone: New and Selected Poems from Asia is another gift from Joe Survant’s treasury. I urge you to read this book.
—Peter Coyote, Author, actor, Zen Buddhist Priest

Like snow falling in the rainforest, these poems are surprising, mysterious. They startle with images both strange and familiar, and let us travel to new places in both the world and the heart.
—Kim Edwards, author of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

These poems offer a new dialect to the truths of suffering and spiritual transcendence that are at root our universal human language.
—Richard Taylor, author of Fathers

Barry George and SIRENS AND RAIN

Tell us the story of your Accents Publishing book, Sirens and Rain.

Sirens and Rain is a book of haiku and senryu (haiku-like poems focusing on human nature) about life in and around Philadelphia. People, animals, trees, fountains, statues, trains, life in all forms as it reveals itself in quintessential moments. With its unique variety of human and (other) natural phenomena, I have found this city to be an ideal place to write these “sketches from life.” The poems in this book came to me over a number of years—as I walked to work, taught my classes, rode my bicycle around the Schuylkill River, and otherwise encountered city life. (Note: the word “haiku” is both singular and plural; the same is true for “senryu.”)

What do you like most about it?

I like how the book is a history, in poetry, of what life was like for my wife, my cats, and me during the years we lived near the corner of 20th and Chestnut Streets. This is the intersection shown in the photograph I took for the cover. A few of the poems were written after we moved from there to another place just around the corner.

What did you have to overcome in order to finish and publish a book?

By the time I began working on the manuscript that became Sirens and Rain, I had plenty of haiku and senryu that could have conceivably been included. So the challenge was to select and arrange the best poems, or the best combination of poems, for the effect I wanted. Organizing by seasons helped; that way I could break the poems into five separate sequences (the four seasons plus a fifth chapter for late summer through early fall). In arranging the poems, I tried to juxtapose nature poems and people poems that played off one another in interesting ways. This entailed many rounds of revisions. You might say that the actual composing of the book was a matter of moving 3 X 5 cards around over and over again.

What do you hope people learn/receive/experience from reading your book?

As with haiku and senryu generally, I hope the poems in this book make readers more keenly, and in most cases more pleasurably, aware of what they encounter moment by moment in life. One of the best effects poems like these can have is to evoke for the reader a thought-feeling like, “Oh, I’ve had that experience—or seen that sight—a hundred times, but before never noticed it in all its beauty and wonder.” Or humor and charm, as the case might be. 

What was your favorite interaction with a reader and/or a fan?

Because haiku and senryu can appeal so readily not only to poets and poetry enthusiasts but to folks who don’t often read poetry, I am always gratified when I learn that my brother-in-law, neighbor, landlord’s son, or high school Facebook friend “gets” and likes my poems. As for a specific interaction, I had an especially fulfilling one last fall when I visited a class that was reading Sirens and Rain as an assigned text for their Community College of Philadelphia literature course. Owing probably in no small part to how well their professor had guided their week-long study of my book, I found the students extremely engaged in and curious about writing haiku. They asked incisive questions. Then, in a kind of workshop format, I went around the room helping them with the short collections they were assigned to write. Almost to a person, perhaps TO a person, they were writing original haiku about subjects that mattered to them. As I left the classroom, literally, I felt a chill go down my spine. We had given a lot to one another.

What are you working on now? Catch us up one significant event in your life since the publication of Sirens and Rain.

The most significant recent event in my writing life is that I just finished the manuscript that is the successor to Sirens and Rain. Entitled “Unofficial Portraits,” it consists of haiku and senryu that portray people by focusing on a moment or detail that is especially revealing about each person’s character. As with Sirens and Rain, the subjects span a range of settings, including work, education, neighbors, law and politics, sports, and family.

Optional bonus question: Is there anything you want to get off your chest about writing or publishing?

Why aren’t haiku about sports (other than baseball) more widely appreciated? Not a particularly pressing question but a pet peeve of mine.