Deerbrook Editions      

authors and reviews

Due to a space and navigation factor, we have changed this page. Articles have their own page as some are older and the author list is growing. Links to authors pages and sites are given as they become available. More recent authors will be added as soon as possible. See deerbrookeditions.blogspot.com for the most recent news and information.

Mimi's page

Mimi White, author of "The Last Island," has been teaching creative writing for twenty-five years, and was Co-Director of PicturePoets of AIR, a non-profit organization that provides enriching arts and cultural experiences to teenage girls. She has been a finalist and a recipient of a NH State Fellowship in Poetry. Her chapbook "The Singed Horizon" was selected by Robert Creeley as the recipient of the 2000 Philbrick Poetry Award. Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire 2005-2007, she is currently working to reduce the effects of global warming as a member of Rye, New Hampshire's Energy Committee.

Portland's first Poet Laureate 2007-2009 Martin Steingesser, author of Brother's of Morning, Deerbrook Editions first title.

Martin's page

Martin Steingesser grew up and lived on New York City's Lower East Side, moving to Maine in 1981. Also a performance poet, he works actively both presenting and teaching in the Maine Arts Commission's Touring Artist and Artist-in-Residence programs. His poems have garnered national recognition, and he has been a Fellow of Blue Mountain Center for the Arts and recipient of the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast Writers' Conference Pierre Menard Poetry Scholarship.

He says writing is a way he touches and makes present a sense of grace he wants in his life: "There are moments in poems I have made--when they are given, when windows, doors, walls are blown off, and I am in a warm, boundless space with whoever is listening."

 

Martin's latest performance piece The Thinking Heart, an ensemble performance work in two voices, with cello, based on the writings of a Dutch woman, Etty Hillesum, who died in the Holocaust.

http://www.martinsteingesser.com

 

The Thinking Heart CD is being released by Old Port Records: www.OldPortRecords.com. Listen to a short feature, with excerpts from The Thinking Heart: http://martinsteingesser.com/programs.php

L.R. Berger, author of "The Unexpected Aviary," won the 2003 Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry. Her book has been reviewed in Field and Pleiades.

http://www.oberlin.edu/ocpress/FIELD/70.htm

 

L. R. Berger's work has been supported by The National Endowment for the Arts, The New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, The PEN New England Discovery Award, The American Academy in Rome, The MacDowell Colony, The Appalachia Poetry Prize, The Blue Mountain Center and Hedgebrook. Berger writes of her poems, "The world dares us to love it: that poignant, sturdy brand of love that can sometimes be wrestled out of the condition of our lives. These poems are driven by an ongoing necessity to take up this dare. They are both the means by which I wrestle and the hard-won outcome: a record of how I persisted, faltered or came to arrive at something approaching this love."

In Praise of The unexpected Aviary

The quality of persistent attention in Berger's work constitutes, I think, the heart of the poetic act. It is hard enough to find the inner space and self-command for that attention in our time; it is a matter of verbal gift and discipline to be able to make such attention audible to others. It matters that her attention is paid to such endangered objects as human love and the extra-human natural world; to the intricate connection between our conduct of love and that imperiled world.

-Mary Baine Campbell Author of The World, The Flesh, and The Angels

In language that is hauntingly singular in its music and its psychological tenor, Berger has wrested from a difficult, and tenuous, even precarious life, a stubborn, intelligent, and affirming poetry. Her lines, like the birds she writes about, dart out of the shadows with such swiftness and grace we feel startled into perception. The reader feels catapulted into a world where truth is apprehended through the complex intelligence and receptivity of the non-linear mind; in fact, the poems persuade us into abandoning our preconceptions and habits of mind.

-Teresa Cader Author of The Paper Wasp

L.R. Beerger's page

 

LR Berger was interviewed by New Hampshire Public Radio after her book, The Unexpected Aviary, received the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry. To listen to her interview, http://www.nhpr.org/archive/2003/10/22/term/15000 which was aired October 22, 2003.

 

L.R. Berger is the New England Associate of Pace e Bene

http://www.paceebene.org/pace/user/lr-berger

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Dawn recently received a poetry grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation of Langley, Washington, a private foundation that supports writers.

Dawn Potter, the author of two collections of poetry, is also associate director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching in Franconia, New Hampshire, where she works alongside former Maine poet laureate Baron Wormser. She teaches poetry in schools and conferences throughout New England and has recently joined the "Beloit Poetry Journal" editorial board. She lives in Harmony, Maine.

For information on what Dawn is doing, go to dlpotter.blogspot.com

IN PRAISE OF BOY LAND & OTHER POEMS

Dawn Potter looks hard at the world and describes it so acutely that we become aware of something hidden underneath it, and that something is often a sense of quiet menace. Her poetry, like one of the characters she describes, "subdues a sense of internal chaos by /keeping her hands quiet at all times." But the chaos is there, and we feel it all the more intensely for its being submerged under the taut surfaces of these remarkable poems. "The un-happened looms," she says in The Bridge. It is that unsettling immanence that charges these poems with mysterious power.

-Jeffrey Harrison

Can poets be characterized by their longings? Dawn Potter writes of wanting "to believe . . . that there is a way to compose these pieces into patterns of great beauty and precision," and indeed, it is a formal compositional elegance precisely balanced with a natural lyric expressiveness that defines the crafty grace that leads the way through Boy Land & Other Poems. Although it's a land where "The un-happened looms" and the bee waits to sting, it is also a place where the poet makes the choices her art requires to create poems that move through disquiet with the greatest of ease.

-Jeanne Marie Beaumont

One of the most difficult things in poetry is to control the "I," to let it stay innocent, to let it act and be acted upon freshly in the poem. Dawn Potter manages this difficult trick with consummate ease, in her poems, no matter where she is, the consciousness is always fresh, the perceptions always immediate and the human connections always moving, moving us, as we are by the moments of life coming into focus, newly seen and absolutely clear.

-Howard Levy

 

Dawn's page

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Stuart Kestenbaum grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey, and received a B.A. degree from Hamilton College. He has lived in Maine for many years and since 1988 has been the director of the Haystack Mountain School of Art and Crafts in Deer Isle.

Stuart's page

September, 2008 American Life in Poetry: Column 181 BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

"Stuart Kestenbaum, the author of this week's poem, lost his brother Howard in the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. We thought it appropriate to commemorate the events of September 11, 2001, by sharing this poem. The poet is the director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on Deer Isle, Maine."    http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org/columns/181.html

Carl Little, author of Ocean Drinker, New & Selected Poems, director of communications and marketing at the Maine Community Foundation, and author of numorous art books, has recently written a book on painting in Maine.

Carl's page

Often marked by wordplay, Carl Little's poems offer a sense of existence that is sometimes surreal and always engaging. From Captain Ahab transported to a modern-day whale watch, to "Calvin Trillin," a poem that revolves around mistaken identity, Little casts a curious eye on the world around him. Maine motifs as well as personal history enrich this lively verse.

The poems in Ocean Drinker have appeared in a wide range of publications, including The Paris Review, Edge of Eden, The Hudson Review, Words & Images, The Georgia Review, Off the Coast, The Puckerbrush Review, The Maine Progressive and The Cafe Review. The anthology The Maine Poets (2003), edited by Wesley McNair, features two of Little's poems. His poem "Ten Tourists Visit Baker's Island, ca. 1900" won the 2002 Friends of Acadia poetry competition, judged by Marion Stocking.

An ex-New Yorker, Little holds a BA from Dartmouth College, an MFA from Columbia University and a master's from Middlebury College. Prior to joining the staff of the Maine Community Foundation, he directed the Ethel H. Blum Gallery at College of the Atlantic. In 2000 he was presented with the Acadia Arts Achievement Award in recognition of his contributions to the arts on Mount Desert Island where he lives and writes. Little is a critic and author of many art books, including The Watercolors of John Singer Sargent and Edward Hopper's New England.

"Marlowe the Great Detective," a full color fully illustrated children's book written by Kaharine Whild, was drawn in pencil and pastel, and is based on a real cat named Marlowe.

Katharine Whild has lived in Maine for over twenty years. and has exhibited in California, Maine, and Germany. She has exhibited in galleries such as The Barn Gallery, The Maine Coast Artists Annual, The Maine Biennial, and is in various private collections.

Katharine illustrated "Prinny's Dream" by Milicent S. Monks (1985), founder of the Ram Island Dance Company.

Katharine received a B.F.A. from Otis Art Institute in 1983.

Katharine's page